Everseeker's Alembic ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Everseeker's Alembic is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Maraging Steel Ingot ×3, Alexandrian Plate ×2, Black Star ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 9 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 Earth Cluster, 9 Fire Cluster, 9 Ice Cluster and 4 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 100, Alchemist to Lv 100, Blacksmith to Lv 100 and Goldsmith to Lv 98 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 9 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Alexandrian Ore (6:00, 18:00), Harmonite Ore (6:00, 18:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Black Star has the widest use: 161 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.