Cotton Shepherd's Tunic

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Cotton Shepherd's Tunic is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Undyed Cotton Cloth ×2, Brass Ingot ×1 and Cotton Yarn ×5 — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 9 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,492 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 664 of the 1,968 Weaver ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 6 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Lightning Shard and 2 Wind Shard.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Weaver to Lv 16 and Goldsmith to Lv 14 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

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

Of the intermediates, Brass Ingot has the widest use: 94 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.