Indagator's Knife ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Indagator's Knife is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Ilmenite Ingot ×4, Craftsman's Alkahest ×3 and Bayberry Cloth ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 56 units, plus 58 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,997 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,767 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 10 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 48 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 17 Earth Cluster, 17 Fire Cluster, 12 Lightning Cluster and 2 other kinds.

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

3 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Bayberry (4:00, 16:00), Ilmenite (8:00, 20:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Ilmenite Ingot has the widest use: 73 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.