Every Lightsaber Type and Variant Explained

Most Jedi and Sith carried a plain single-bladed lightsaber and never needed anything else. A few did not. This guide covers every named lightsaber type and variant across both continuities, roughly forty designs in total, ordered from the ones you have seen a hundred times to the ones that turn up once and never again. Each entry notes whether it belongs to Canon, Legends, or both.

The standard single-bladed lightsaber#

Canon and Legends. The default, and the default for good reasons. A straight hilt of roughly 24 to 30 centimetres gave the wielder a full range of movement and worked equally well in one hand or two. It was also the easiest saber on this list to build. No complicated emitter arrays, no second handle, no rare or additional crystal. One kyber crystal, a power cell and a focusing lens. That combination suited nearly every situation a Jedi walked into, which is why the vast majority of the Jedi Order carried one.

Double-bladed lightsabers and saberstaffs#

Canon and Legends. Also called the saberstaff or lightstaff. The hilt runs roughly twice the length of a standard weapon so both hands can grip it, and the design was probably modelled on the Zabrak quarterstaff, the zhaboka. Legends credits its invention to the Dark Lords of the old Sith Empire, with Darth Maul being the version everyone pictures. Jedi did use them, but rarely, because the style demands relentless aggression. Most wielders leaned on Form VII, the style the Order treated as forbidden, built around acrobatics and heavy power blows.

Several sub-types exist. Hinged double-bladed lightsabers are effectively two sabers joined at the pommel, which makes them more portable and lets the wielder fold the weapon around an enemy blade to trap it. Pong Krell carried two of them during the Clone Wars, one blue and one green, and both were enormous enough to sit near great lightsaber territory. Split sabers use a locking mechanism instead of a weld so the two halves can be separated for Jar'Kai twin-blade fighting, which is how Asajj Ventress used hers most of the time.

Inquisitor spinning lightsabers#

Canon. The most sophisticated double-bladed design and, arguably, the worst. Unlike a standard saberstaff, the Inquisitor hilt was no longer than a regular lightsaber, so it could be fought single-bladed or opened up into a staff. The ring could also spin at high speed, which served as intimidation, as an aggressive attack pattern, and as a way of lifting the wielder through the air. All those moving parts made the weapon fragile. Jedi worked out the weakness quickly and exploited it, and the Inquisitorius lost people to their own hardware.

Curved-hilt lightsabers#

Canon and Legends. A hilt with a built-in curve so it sits deeper in the palm. That gives more powerful and more precise overhead blows, and it allows tiny changes in blade angle mid-exchange that force an opponent to keep readjusting. It suits one-handed Form II duelling, which is why Count Dooku and, in Legends, Darth Bane both used one. Two curved hilts can also be joined into a saberstaff, though the curve makes the combined weapon awkward to swing, which is one reason most owners of a matched pair fought with them separately.

Crossguard lightsabers#

Canon and Legends. Small vents called quillons sit below the main emitter and project two shorter tributary blades. Their job is to stop an opponent from running their blade down yours during a lock and taking your hands off. Designs vary a lot: some quillons fire out at ninety degrees, Darth Atrius angled his away from the wielder, Roblio Darte's had a single vent, and Stellan Gios carried a High Republic version with a physical metal crossguard that folded out on ignition rather than any second blade at all. Crossguards can be fitted to a double-bladed hilt too, though that is mostly an Old Republic curiosity. They work with an ordinary kyber crystal, but they are strongly associated with cracked ones, since a damaged crystal dumps excess energy that has to go somewhere. Kylo Ren is the obvious example.

The fractured Bogan and the unstable Peacemaker#

Legends. Two Old Republic era weapons that read like double-bladed sabers but behave differently. One blade sits slightly longer than a standard lightsaber; the other is stubby, good for short thrusts in the way a knife is. Like a crossguard, that second emitter looks to be venting the excess energy of an unstable crystal rather than serving any real offensive purpose. They look superb and they were clearly a hazard, since the short blade restricts movement and sits close to the wielder's own arm.

Lightwhips#

Canon and Legends. A lightwhip runs on the same principles as a lightsaber but produces a long flexible strand instead of a rigid blade, often several metres of it. Legends explains this as multiple smaller crystals with no containment field holding the plasma straight. Most produce a single lash, though cat o' nine tails versions with multiple tassels exist. The advantage is reach and sheer unfamiliarity: almost nobody trains against one, the strand wraps around a parrying blade instead of being stopped by it, and multiple tassels can come at a defender from several angles at once. The drawbacks are severe. The blade is weaker than a standard lightsaber, plenty of materials survive a direct hit, it is nearly useless defensively, and an untrained wielder is as likely to maim themselves as anyone else. Hit one hard enough and it shorts out violently. Githany and Lumiya are the famous Legends users; in Canon, Vernestra Rwoh built a whip mode into her lightsaber.

Lightsaber pikes#

Canon and Legends. Used much like a saberstaff, except the second end is a shaft of lightsaber-resistant material, usually phrik, rather than a second blade. The blade itself is often shorter and thicker than standard, and the point is reach. The Jedi Temple Guard version with twin yellow blades is the one most people know. Sub-variants change hilt and blade length, and one of the more useful is the retractable pike, which collapses onto a belt for carrying and extends for the fight.

Sickle-bladed lightsabers#

Canon. Instead of a straight column of plasma, the blade curves like a sickle. The known example belonged to Darth Noctyss, an ancient Sith who went to Exegol hunting immortality. Very little is recorded about why the blade is shaped that way, beyond speculation that it marked a particular sect within the Sith.

Contained energy axes#

Legends. A plasma blade mounted as an axe head. They cut through most materials easily enough but were poor battlefield weapons, and were mostly reserved for ceremonial executions. Other versions are rumoured to have been used for mining unusually hard and valuable metals.

Flicker-phase blades#

Canon. A normal-looking lightsaber fitted with a modified activation mechanism that ignites and extinguishes the blade at random intervals. It sounds like a terrible idea and largely is, but it makes the weapon almost impossible to block reliably and thoroughly confusing to fight. Both the Jedi and the Sith considered it unsporting, so it stayed rare.

Dual-phase lightsabers#

Canon and Legends. Two or more kyber crystals in one hilt, with a secondary set of focusing crystals that lets the blade change length at the press of a control. How far it extends depends on the crystals used; some run from about 1.3 to 3 metres. It was already considered antiquated by the Clone Wars, a relic of an older and nastier era of duelling. Darth Vader is the best known owner and used the length change exactly as intended, as a surprise during blade locks. Corran Horn used the same trick in Legends and killed a Yuuzhan Vong warrior with it.

Great lightsabers and lightclubs#

Legends and Canon. Length brings reach and force behind a swing, but the hilts get heavy and the species wielding them get bigger. The lightclub, known in Canon as the great lightsaber, pushes the blade up to three metres with a hilt weighing around five kilograms thanks to specialist power packs and focusing crystals. Humans and anything smaller struggle to use one at all. The largest lightsaber on record belonged to a droid war god worshipped on the Legends world of Zaddja, with a blade that looks somewhere between four and six metres long.

Shotos, lightdaggers and lightfoils#

Canon and Legends. At the opposite end, the shoto is a scaled-down lightsaber with a shorter hilt and blade, also called a lightdagger. Most often it rides in the off hand alongside a full-length saber, which makes it very good at quick counterattacks and unusually effective against awkward weapons like the lightwhip, as Luke Skywalker demonstrated. Some duellists fight with two, trading reach and power for speed. Others simply have no choice: Yoda is the obvious case, along with Yaddle and Even Piell. The lightfoil is a related short weapon, elegantly built and popular among the saber rakes of the Tapani sector, who fought duels with them without being Force-sensitive at all. Because they could not obtain kyber crystals, lightfoils used lower quality focusing crystals and produced a weaker blade.

Guard shotos and lightsaber tonfa#

Legends. A short lightsaber with a second handle extending at ninety degrees from the main hilt, so the blade can run parallel to the forearm. Held by the perpendicular grip it is superb at blocking, and it opens up a wide vocabulary of blocking, trapping, jabbing and stabbing techniques. It is also dangerous in untrained hands, and the perpendicular grip costs you offensive power. Because the weapon exists to block other lightsabers, the casing was ideally machined from phrik, which was expensive. Maris Brood carried a pair in The Force Unleashed.

Underwater lightsabers#

Canon and Legends. Most lightsabers short out the moment the blade touches water. Kit Fisto got around it by fitting two kyber crystals running a bifurcating cyclical ignition pulse, which let him fight submerged on Mon Cala. He recorded the modification in the Jedi Order's great holocron, and Luke Skywalker later made it standard across every saber in his New Jedi Order.

Lava lightsabers#

Legends. From the outside this looks like an ordinary single-bladed weapon. Inside is a lava crystal, found only in the deepest parts of volcanic worlds, and it changes what the blade actually is. Instead of near-weightless plasma you get something heavy and dense with the consistency of lava, throwing off fire and spitting molten fragments mid-duel. The weight and the spatter made it brutal to control. Only heavily augmented wielders such as Vader could realistically use one, and even he went back to a normal blade.

The Dahgee lightsaber#

Legends. Used by a secretive Jedi sect on the world of Dahgee, and unusual on two counts. The blade was zigzagged rather than straight, and its colouring was strange, described as silver and black with a turquoise aura, with other sources listing the crystal as producing a green blade with a black core. The shape was almost certainly poor for actual duelling, which has led to the suggestion it was closer to a ceremonial weapon. When the Jedi High Council stopped sending Padawans to Dahgee, the sect declined and its blades went with it.

Ranged lightsabers: rifles, Farkillers and blaster hybrids#

Canon and Legends. Almost every weapon here is a melee weapon, with three exceptions. The lightsaber rifle literally loads lightsabers as ammunition, melting them after a handful of shots, and turns that into a devastating blast of energy. It works on the same idea as the Death Star superlaser, focusing energy through kyber into a destructive beam, just scaled down to something Jocasta Nu could carry into the ruined Jedi Temple. The Farkiller is a Legends sniper rifle built on lightsaber technology that could hit a target with pinpoint accuracy from close to a hundred miles out. Third is the lightsaber-blaster hybrid: Ezra Bridger built a stun blaster into his first lightsaber to compensate for his weak blade work, and it remains a far more interesting weapon than the conventional saber he built later.

Sabercanes#

Canon and Legends. Mechanically no different from a standard lightsaber, but with the hilt disguised as the head of a walking cane. That makes it excellent for going unnoticed until the moment you decide not to be. Tera Sinube used one during the Clone Wars, and Maul carried one during the Imperial era.

Forcesabers#

Legends. The first plasma-bladed melee weapons, tens of thousands of years before the Clone Wars. They resembled lightsabers but ran on a fundamentally different principle: instead of drawing on a crystal, they were powered directly by the dark side of the Force. That made them lethal and made them corrupting, since light side users struggled to wield one without being pulled under. The Rakata used them, likely the Celestials before that, and the Je'daii learned to build them. The argument over whether to keep using dark side weapons split the order in the Force Wars. The side that said no won, and renamed themselves the Jedi.

Protosabers and retrosabers#

Legends. Having rejected the Forcesaber, the Jedi still wanted a plasma blade, so they worked from the same schematics and produced the protosaber. Without the dark side as a power source they needed a large external battery pack connected to the hilt by a cable, which limited how long the weapon ran and meant you could forget about throwing it. Miniaturised power cells eventually killed the design and gave us the modern lightsaber. Some Jedi stuck with it anyway. The retrosaber keeps the external pack on purpose, because a modern belt-mounted battery can dump a brief surge into the blade, burning it hotter for a few seconds and overwhelming an ordinary lightsaber.

Lightsaber gauntlets#

Legends. Two designs worth knowing. The protoblade is a gauntlet with a large retractable spike that an external power pack energises with plasma, letting it cut like a lightsaber. The spike itself was cortosis, which is durable but also has the habit of shorting out plasma, so the weapon occasionally killed its own blade. Separately, concept art for Plo Koon shows him equipped with a twin-bladed lightsaber gauntlet, a little like Wolverine. It never made the film.

The lightsaber parasol#

Canon-adjacent, from Star Wars: Visions. A Sith design that uses an auxiliary component to change what the blade does. Link the parasol auxiliary to the hilt and the energy from the kyber crystal is directed straight out and then fanned outwards into many blades in the shape of an umbrella. A second extension component on the pommel makes the whole thing longer again. Both parts detach, leaving an ordinary single-bladed lightsaber.

The Darksaber and sword-profile blades#

Canon and Legends. The Darksaber is an ancient black-bladed lightsaber, built by Tarre Vizsla, the first Mandalorian inducted into the Jedi Order. Its blade is shorter than standard, flattened and pointed like a conventional sword rather than rounded, with a crackling white edge, and the hilt is unmistakably Mandalorian: angular pommel, hand guard, slit-shaped emitter, all beskar. Ignited or swung it sounds higher pitched than a normal saber, closer to a shriek than a hum. A common theory holds that concentrating the same energy into a thinner profile makes it cut better, though the wiki is clear it still cannot cut through pure beskar; it can only heat it until it glows. It is not the only weapon with that profile either. Using different emitters and lenses, some wielders shaped their blades like traditional swords. Most Jedi considered them inferior because they do not cut omnidirectionally, but in the hands of a Form I user they were effective. See Pre Vizsla, Sabine Wren and Bo-Katan Kryze for where the blade ended up.

Black blades and Project Blackwing#

Legends and Canon. The Darksaber is not the only black lightsaber. Project Blackwing was an attempt to reach immortality through Sith alchemy, and it failed in the worst possible way, producing a virus that turned its victims into something closer to zombies. The sickness spread to the semi-living kyber crystals as well. Crystals inside the infected quarantine zone on Dathomir turned black, and a saber built with one produced a black blade with smoke pouring off the hilt.

Long-handle lightsabers and concealed blades#

Legends. Long-handle designs simply lengthen the grip to give the duellist more room for the hands and more force behind an attack. Warb Null's weapon was roughly double a standard hilt; Darth Nihl's was a full staff with a blade on the end. One extremely rare version went further and hid a second crimson blade inside the hilt, which could not be lit at the same time as the primary green one. Switching between them mid-fight left an opponent with no idea which end of the weapon was about to be dangerous.

The War Dragon rider's saber#

Legends. Sometime between the start of the Clone Wars and the rise of the Galactic Empire, a warrior mounted on an Ubese Thorn-Back War Dragon carried a lightsaber with two hilts and three blades: one at each end and one emitted from the middle, between the two handles. That middle blade is smarter than it looks. Saberstaff users habitually smash the centre of the hilt into an opponent's face, which worked beautifully on Qui-Gon Jinn, but a good block can shear the hilt in half. Putting a blade there makes the block impossible.

Exar Kun's lightsaber#

Legends. Generally treated as the most powerful lightsaber in Star Wars. Kun built it roughly four thousand years before the Clone Wars, welding two lightsabers pommel to pommel in imitation of the zhaboka before improving on the prototype. It could be fought single or double-bladed and the blade length shifted between about 0.5 and 1.5 metres. What actually made it fearsome was its affinity for the dark side. The negative energy coming off the blade unsettled and confused Jedi opponents and pulled weaker minds under entirely, and it drove the blade's heat and intensity up. At full power it cut through lightsaber-resistant materials, including Force-imbued swords and Mandalorian beskar armour.

The lightsaber suit of Lord Nyax#

Legends. The last entry is barely a lightsaber and barely a person. Irek Ismaren, rumoured to be Palpatine's illegitimate son, positioned himself as a contender for the Imperial throne after the Emperor died at Endor. Using his mother's contacts inside the Imperial military he had himself rebuilt: extra muscle mass, extra bone, and lightsabers surgically implanted into his wrists, elbows and knees. A suit of armour wired into his nervous system triggered them, so he could ignite any blade with a thought and the system would shut one down automatically if it was about to impale him. He took the name Lord Nyax, and it took Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade Skywalker and Tahiri Veila together to put him down.