Gold Thumb's Needle ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Gold Thumb's Needle is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Craftsman's Tri-solution ×3, Rhodochrosite ×3 and Octahedrite Nugget ×2 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 51 units, plus 54 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,830 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 2,075 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 48 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 18 Fire Cluster, 12 Wind Cluster, 9 Lightning Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 100, Alchemist to Lv 100 and Blacksmith to Lv 100 — 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: Cordia Sap (0:00, 12:00), Octahedrite (10:00, 22:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Octahedrite Nugget has the widest use: 67 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.