Barding of Eternal Darkness ★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Barding of Eternal Darkness is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Chondrite Ingot ×2, Duraluminum Ingot ×2 and Saffron Cloth ×1 — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 31 units, plus 40 crystals.

That bill outweighs 10,578 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,120 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 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 Fire Crystal, 9 Earth Cluster, 6 Fire Cluster and 3 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 90, Blacksmith to Lv 88 and Weaver to Lv 80 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

4 of the 7 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Dolomite (8:00, 20:00) and Raindrop Cotton Boll (10:00, 22:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Chondrite Ingot has the widest use: 210 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.