Stonegold Needle

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Stonegold Needle is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Stonegold Nugget ×2, Hard Mudstone Whetstone ×1, Palladium Nugget ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 22 units, plus 40 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,402 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,234 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 11 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 29 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 35 Wind Crystal and 5 Fire Crystal.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Goldsmith to Lv 71 and Carpenter to Lv 71 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 6 raw materials are gathered, and one of them is time-gated: Gold Ore (9:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Palladium Nugget has the widest use: 129 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.