High Steel Ingot

Taken all the way down to base materials, one High Steel Ingot is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — High Steel Nugget ×1 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 9 units, plus 6 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,492 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 597 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 3 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal.

Every step is Blacksmith work, from a Lv 61 intermediate up to the Lv 62 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

All 3 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

High Steel Ingot is itself consumed by 57 further recipes, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.