Exarchic Ring of Casting ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Exarchic Ring of Casting is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Solstice Ingot ×2, Dwarven Mythril Nugget ×1 and Grade 4 Intelligence Alkahest ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 31 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,346 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 25 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 9 Fire Cluster, 9 Wind Cluster, 7 Wind Crystal and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 80 and Alchemist to Lv 80 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Hard Water (4:00, 16:00) and Solstice Stone (2:00, 14:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Dwarven Mythril Nugget has the widest use: 154 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.