Silver Needle

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Silver Needle is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Mudstone Whetstone ×1 and Silver Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 7 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 564 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 3 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Wind Shard and 2 Fire Shard.

Every step is Goldsmith work, from a Lv 20 intermediate up to the Lv 26 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

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, Silver Ingot has the widest use: 157 recipes call for it, spanning eight of the eight crafting classes.