Diamond Barding ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Diamond Barding is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Duraluminum Ingot ×2, Dwarven Cotton ×2, Solstice Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 27 units, plus 38 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,763 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 962 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 32 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 14 Lightning Crystal, 9 Earth Cluster, 9 Fire Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 80, Blacksmith to Lv 80, Goldsmith 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: Dolomite (8:00, 20:00) and Solstice Stone (2:00, 14:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

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