Smaragdine Rod ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Smaragdine Rod is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Prismatic Ingot ×3, Pliable Glass Fiber ×2 and Lignum Vitae Lumber ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 41 units, plus 31 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,923 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,918 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 27 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 8 Fire Cluster, 8 Wind Cluster, 7 Wind Crystal and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 80, Alchemist to Lv 80 and Carpenter to Lv 78 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

3 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Prismstone (4:00, 16:00) and Sandalwood Sap (2:00, 14:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Lignum Vitae Lumber has the widest use: 134 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.