Initiate's Head Knife

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Initiate's Head Knife is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Ash Lumber ×1, Iron Ingot ×1 and Mudstone Whetstone ×1 — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 8 units, plus 5 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,254 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 529 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 3 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 2 Fire Shard, 2 Wind Shard and 1 Earth Shard.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 19, Goldsmith to Lv 20 and Carpenter to Lv 10 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

One intermediate outranks the result: Mudstone Whetstone is a Lv 20 Goldsmith recipe feeding a Lv 19 craft, so that step, not the last one, is the real gate.

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