Pactmaker's Alembic ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Pactmaker's Alembic is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Eblan Danburite ×3, Lunar Adamantite Ingot ×3, Star Quartz ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 46 units, plus 58 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,540 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,324 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 52 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 18 Fire Cluster, 16 Wind Crystal, 12 Earth Cluster and 2 other kinds.

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

4 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Lunar Adamantite Ore (2:00, 14:00) and Raw Eblan Danburite (0:00, 12:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

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