Gold Thumb's Alembic ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Gold Thumb's Alembic is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Craftsman's Tri-solution ×3, Octahedrite Nugget ×3 and Rhodochrosite ×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 1,355 of the 1,441 Armorer 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 15 Fire Cluster, 12 Earth Cluster, 9 Lightning Cluster and 3 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 100, Alchemist to Lv 100, Blacksmith to Lv 100 and Goldsmith 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.