Cotton Sugarloaf Hat

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Cotton Sugarloaf Hat is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Iron Ingot ×1, Undyed Cotton Cloth ×1 and Cotton Yarn ×3 — which resolve to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 7 units, plus 7 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,963 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 557 of the 1,968 Weaver ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 4 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Lightning Shard, 1 Fire Shard and 1 Wind Shard.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Weaver to Lv 23 and Blacksmith to Lv 16 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

Both raw materials are gathered, and no spot for either is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Iron Ingot has the widest use: 113 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.