Melon Pie ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Melon Pie is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Dark Rye Flour ×2 and Fermented Butter ×1 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 15 units, plus 21 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,735 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 891 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 15 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 8 Fire Crystal, 7 Fire Shard, 3 Fire Cluster and 1 other kind.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 53 intermediate up to the Lv 90 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

2 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Lemonette (6:00, 18:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Fermented Butter has the widest use: 32 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.