Emerald Barding ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Emerald Barding is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Brashgold Plate ×2, Dwarven Cotton ×2, Defthand's Dissolvent ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 32 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 881 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 26 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 14 Lightning Crystal, 7 Earth Cluster, 7 Ice Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 80, Alchemist to Lv 80 and Weaver to Lv 78 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

3 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Brashgold Ore (2:00, 14:00) and Tender Dill (0:00, 12:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Dwarven Cotton has the widest use: 165 recipes call for it, spanning eight of the eight crafting classes.