Everything Lightsabers Cannot Cut Through

A lightsaber blade burns with roughly the heat of a star, somewhere around 25,000 degrees Celsius, and it goes through blast doors, bulkheads and armour plate as though none of it is there. Speed of cut depends on density, not on whether the material can stop it. A small number of things can. This guide runs through every lightsaber-resistant material in Canon and Legends, roughly ordered from the ones that barely help to the one nothing has ever beaten, and notes which continuity each belongs to.

Armorweave#

Canon and Legends. The most flexible material here and the least effective. Armorweave is a cloth that dissipates energy across its surface, which gives it limited protection against blaster bolts and some against a lightsaber. It will not save you from a committed strike. What it does is add a layer, and it does so without costing you any movement, which is why it turns up as a cape rather than a plate. Count Dooku and Darth Vader both wore it that way, and Mandalorians often worked it into their armour. In Vader's case it also gave the Dark Lord his silhouette.

Norris root#

Legends. A rare plant native to the planet Omar. During the Jedi Civil War, someone worked out a sophisticated method of crushing the root down into a red dye. Applied to clothing, that dye produced energy-resistant robes capable of turning aside blaster bolts and lightsaber blades. It is the only entry on this list that arrives as a fabric treatment rather than a material in its own right.

Orbalisk armour#

Legends. Orbalisks are parasites that feed on the dark side of the Force. Once attached to a host they grow and multiply until the host is entirely covered and consumed. Freedon Nadd worked out how to stop them covering the face, hands and feet, which turns an infestation into a suit of living, lightsaber-resistant armour. It is extraordinarily painful, so only the hardest dark siders could tolerate it, Darth Bane being the obvious one. It also has a fatal flaw: orbalisks are not lightning resistant. Bane eventually had to strip his armour off after killing most of it with his own Force lightning.

Vonduun crab armour#

Legends. The Yuuzhan Vong engineered biotech for every job, and their signature defence was vonduun crab armour, which engulfs the wearer in the same way orbalisks do. It is close to fully resistant to blaster fire and lightsabers both, and Jedi who tried to hack through it got nowhere. Being alive, it inherits the problems of living things. The armour is allergic to certain pollens, and Yuuzhan Vong warriors have died when their own plate reacted to Ithorian bafforr tree pollen, swelled, and suffocated them. Like the orbalisks, it is badly vulnerable to Force lightning, which turned out to be the great weakness of Yuuzhan Vong biotech generally.

Amphistaffs#

Legends. The main Yuuzhan Vong weapon and one of the most durable objects in the galaxy. An amphistaff is a genetically engineered serpent that works as both a melee and a ranged weapon, hardening into a quarterstaff or spear or softening into a whip at a hand signal from its bonded warrior. Its edge is measured in atoms, so it slices flesh with no resistance at all, and no lightsaber can cut it. Used as a staff it absorbs blow after blow unfazed; used as a whip it winds around an ignited blade while its jaws go for the wielder's face. The only reason it does not sit further down this list is the same weakness the armour has. Amphistaffs are living things, so allergies, viruses and electrical current all degrade them badly.

Felucian skullblades#

Legends. From The Force Unleashed. Using the bones of an unidentified creature native to their world, the Felucians produced blades strong enough to hold up against the heat of a lightsaber. The working theory is that the bones contain microcrystals with properties close to kyber, and once the Felucians imbued them with the Force the result was a deadly and near-indestructible weapon.

Ultrachrome#

Legends. Used by the Inquisitors and by the Sith during the Great Sith War. Ultrachrome is a superconductor, so energy from slugs, blaster bolts and lightsabers disperses instantly across its whole mass instead of concentrating at the point of contact, and without concentration there is no cut. The drawback is spectacular. Pump enough energy into an ultrachrome plate or shield and all of it melts at once, which leaves the wearer in an awkward position at best and covered in molten sludge at worst. That is probably why most users put it into vibroshields rather than armour, since a shield can be thrown away the moment it starts glowing.

Phrik#

Legends and Canon. The lightsaber-resistant metal that saw the most use across the Skywalker era. Phrik was mined on the moon Gromas 16 and, once processed, came out extremely light and extremely durable. A phrik container survived the destruction of Alderaan. It is thought to have been developed during the Mandalorian Wars by the scientist Gorman Vandrayk, better known for being forced to weaponise exogorths. Phrik also disperses electrical current, which made it close to ideal for the electrostaffs carried by General Grievous's MagnaGuards, and it went into Palpatine's lightsaber too. After the Empire rose, every phrik mine was nationalised and the metal was poured into the Legends version of the Dark Trooper programme. Unlike cortosis it will not short a blade out; it just refuses to be cut.

Neuranium#

Legends and Canon. An incredibly dense metal used to shield against radiation and plasma. Its density is so extreme that gravity-sensitive species can feel it warping space around it, in the manner of a very small black hole. Neuranium also blocks scans, which is how Palpatine got away with hiding a lightsaber inside one of the statues of the Four Sages of Dwartii standing in his own office. That is close to everything recorded about it in either continuity.

Songsteel#

Legends. A luminescent silver metal, extraordinarily light, resisting lightsabers to roughly the same degree as phrik or cortosis. It is rare, tedious and difficult to forge, and it was reserved for exquisite and expensive weapons: swords and staffs that could take the heat of a blade without giving way. Like phrik, it deflects rather than shorts out. The named Legends owners of songsteel weapons are Darrus Jeht and the Master in Violet.

Force-imbued blades and Zeison Sha discblades#

Legends. This one predates the lightsaber entirely. Before the weapon existed, the Je'daii created Force-imbued metal blades through a ritual that channelled the Force into the steel and realigned its molecular structure into an unbreakable lattice. In the same way a wielder later bonds with the crystal in a hilt, the smith bonded with the blade. How well one held up against a lightsaber depended entirely on the Force powers of the person carrying it. Dark siders produced blades that behaved much like lightsabers themselves, cutting through most objects and deflecting blaster bolts. Force-imbued swords stayed in service for thousands of years after the lightsaber arrived, though by the time of Revan almost every Force user had moved on.

The Zeison Sha took the same technique somewhere else. Neither Jedi nor Sith, and unusually skilled telekinetics, they forged Force-imbued metal into discblades and used the Force to guide them into a target at speed and with frightening accuracy. A lightsaber is not much help against a weapon that arrives from an unpredictable angle at range.

Beskar#

Canon and Legends. The famous one. Mandalorian iron, known in Mando'a as beskar, is found only in the Mandalore system. The Mandalorians treat the metal as sacred and will not allow outsiders to wear it, and forging it into spears and similar weapons was frowned upon, since beskar weaponry is one of the few things that can pierce beskar armour. In Legends they did it anyway, producing the beskad, a sword that closely resembles the Darksaber and traces back to the ancient Taung, the species that founded Mandalorian culture. Note the ceiling: even the Darksaber, itself built from beskar, cannot cut pure beskar. It can only heat the metal until it glows red. In both continuities the Imperials strip-mined almost all of it. Legends gave the Mandalorians a reprieve, since the war with the extragalactic Yuuzhan Vong exposed an enormous new vein on Mandalore, enough that they began armouring entire ships with it and became a great power again. For the Canon version of the story, see Din Djarin.

Zillo Beast hide#

Canon and Legends. The Zillo Beast of Malastare stood 97 metres tall and its plated hide was effectively impervious to energy weapons of every kind, including blaster fire, explosions and lightsabers, as the Clone Wars demonstrated at length. Very little is recorded about the hide beyond what that story showed, though it is known that Palpatine ordered the creature cloned and its armour studied, which leaves the door open for more.

Cortosis#

Canon and Legends. A rare and brittle metal that works on a different principle from everything else here. Cortosis does not resist a blade because it tolerates heat or because it is especially strong. Its superconducting properties short the lightsaber out for several minutes, so the Jedi in front of you is suddenly holding a metal tube. It can be worked into practically anything: Jedi have used cortosis swords against Vader, and Cad Bane had cortosis bullets made, then stopped, because they were far too expensive.

Quantum crystalline armour#

Legends. The most overpowered material in Star Wars. Imperial scientists developed it at the Maw Installation specifically for the Sun Crusher, and it was made by producing a molecular lattice of densely packed atoms and then stacking a second, phase-shifted layer on top. The result is near indestructible and lightweight at the same time. The Sun Crusher took a direct hit from the Death Star prototype and came away with very little damage. Since the Death Star superlaser is essentially a giant lightsaber blade using the same kyber-focused principle, that is about as close to a test as the lore provides. No one has ever put a lightsaber to it directly, but a hull designed to fly through supernovae is not going to notice one.

What else the archives list#

Legends. A few oddities round out the record. Water is the most practical: unless a lightsaber has been specially built, submerging the blade shorts it out, which is why underwater sabers needed a bifurcating cyclical ignition pulse. Rain only makes the weapon steam. Sith alchemy was used during the first Sith Empire to augment ordinary metals against the then-unstoppable lightsaber, and its most notorious later use was reinforcing Vader's armour. Darkswords were an ancient sword type made from a material that could parry a blade without shorting it. On the biological side, the skin of the tikulini worms of Jazbina could take a lightsaber strike, and the crystal scales of the lava dragons of Eol Sha resisted a blade too, though those could still be shattered.