Gold Thumb's Pliers ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Gold Thumb's Pliers is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Octahedrite Nugget ×4, Desert Lapis ×3 and Rhodochrosite ×1 — 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 1,731 of the 1,932 Blacksmith 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 27 Fire Cluster, 15 Earth Cluster and 12 Wind Cluster.

The chain crosses two disciplines — 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: Desert Lapis Ore (2:00, 14:00), Octahedrite (10:00, 22:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

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