Indagator's Needle ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Indagator's Needle is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Craftsman's Alkahest ×3, Rutilated Quartz ×3 and Ilmenite Ingot ×2 — 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 2,104 of the 2,216 Goldsmith 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 20 Fire Cluster, 14 Wind Cluster, 9 Lightning Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 90, Alchemist to Lv 90 and Blacksmith 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: Ilmenite (8:00, 20:00), Mornveil Tree Bark (4:00, 16:00) 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.