Classical Earrings of Fending ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Classical Earrings of Fending is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Golden Silk ×1, Grade 6 Vitality Alkahest ×1, Rhodium Ingot ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 11 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 40 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,346 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 34 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 16 Wind Crystal, 9 Wind Cluster, 6 Fire Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 90, Alchemist to Lv 90 and Weaver to Lv 90 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

7 of the 11 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Double-edged Herb (10:00, 22:00), Golden Cocoon (8:00, 20:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Star Quartz has the widest use: 157 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.