Imagine you’re a post-Endor Jedi hopeful trying to build your first lightsaber. The sacred caverns of Ilum? Gone, hollowed out into Starkiller Base and then blown apart when Poe’s torpedoes lit the place up. The pilgrimage markets on Jedha? A smoking crater after the Empire’s “single-reactor test” torched the Holy City and chewed a hole in the moon’s crust.
With the two most famous kyber lodes wiped off the starcharts in barely a generation, it’s easy to panic: did the galaxy just lose its supply of lightsaber hearts for good?
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Beyond Ilum and Jedha Lies a Whole Map of Active Crystal Sources
We’ve got to understand that Ilum and Jedha aren’t the only places kyber crystals can be found—any planet with a “high concentration of Force energy” can potentially grow them. That’s something Luke Skywalker himself points out in the canon book Star Wars: The Secrets of the Jedi.
Sure, Ilum and Jedha were like the galaxy’s showroom floors for kyber, but once you start digging through newer canon, you realize kyber crystals have popped up all over the place. They’re not just rare mystical artifacts anymore; they’re part of a bigger Force-connected ecosystem that goes way beyond what we saw in the movies.
Christophis & Mygeeto – Both of these planets come up in Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel when Lyra Erso confronts Galen about the origin of a batch of colorless kyber crystals. Galen, still mesmerized by the crystal’s purity, says: “Mygeeto, perhaps,” Galen said, distracted and still fascinated by the colorless kyber. “Possibly Ilum or Christophis.” While Lyra doubts they were mined from those planets, suspecting they came from harvested Jedi lightsabers instead, Galen’s mention of them confirms that Christophis and Mygeeto were recognized kyber-rich worlds. That’s canon confirmation that these planets weren’t just battlegrounds—they were part of the kyber network the Empire had eyes on.
Utapau – Remember the unfinished Clone Wars arc “Crystal Crisis”? Obi-Wan and Anakin stumble on a house-sized green kyber the Separatists are trying to smuggle off-world. The thing is so massive it needs a freighter of its own—and that’s just one chunk buried in Utapau’s sinkhole caves.
Lothal – While the Empire later tried to extract massive kyber crystals from the planet, we first saw how deeply connected Lothal was to the Force when Ezra Bridger received his own crystal there. In the Star Wars Rebels episode “Path of the Jedi,” Ezra enters a hidden Jedi Temple on Lothal, where—after a vision and a lesson from Master Yoda—he’s rewarded with a kyber crystal to build his first lightsaber. That moment confirmed that kyber can naturally grow on Lothal, and that the planet is attuned enough to the Force to host a Jedi Temple and produce crystals for initiates.
Exegol – Fast-forward to the Sith Eternal: each Xyston-class Star Destroyer packs a planet-killer cannon powered by “a miniature sun channeling energy through kyber crystals.” If Palpatine had enough crystal mass to arm a thousand destroyers, the hidden mines under those black deserts must be enormous.
Dantooine and Beyond – Fans on Reddit love pointing out that Legends once listed Dantooine as a lightsaber stop, and nothing in the new canon rules it out—just unconfirmed for now. And Gareth Edwards has even joked that Jedha’s supply came from a kyber-rich asteroid that slammed into the moon—proof crystals can ride meteorites and end up in odd places, including scattered belts and rogue rocks.
Point is, Ilum and Jedha were famous because they were easy to reach and steeped in Jedi tradition, not because they were the only game in town. Crack open the databanks and you’ll find at least half a dozen worlds (plus a few dusty asteroid pockets) still glittering with living, Force-attuned crystals just waiting to be claimed. The hunt’s tougher now, but kyber is far from extinct.
Salvage, Recycling, and Bleeding Keep Kyber Flowing
Kyber isn’t a single-use resource—once a crystal’s been cut, it can be reclaimed, healed, or even cooked up in a lab if someone’s desperate enough.
Old lightsabers are basically portable crystal banks. In the Ahsoka novel, Tano cracks open the Sixth Brother’s spinning saber, “bleeds” the red corruption out of his twin kybers, and ends up with the clean white cores she uses for her signature blades. The scene proves any Force-user with the right skill set can reverse a bleed and repurpose a crystal, no fresh mine required.
Wrecked super-weapons leave plenty of shards behind. After a battle, the debris field is basically a grab-bag of fractured kyber. Canon notes a salvage site on Yavin 4 where Rebel crews sift Death Star wreckage for useful material, and kef-Bir’s oceans are littered with super-laser components from the second station. Starkiller Base’s remains orbit Ilum’s newborn star in chunks the size of cities—no source says every crystal core detonated, so scavengers have plenty to hunt.
Add it all together and the picture’s clear: between reclaimed sabers, salvage yards the size of moons, and the option to grow new stock in a pinch, the galaxy’s crystal supply still has plenty of ways to keep the lightsabers ignited.
And If All Else Fails, Legends Gave Us Synthetic Crystals
Let’s not forget one more wild card from Star Wars Legends: synthetic kyber crystals. Back in the old Expanded Universe days, Sith Lords weren’t always mining or bleeding natural crystals. They just made their own. In the Star Wars Legends comics and novels, synthetic crystals were forged through intense heat, pressure, and dark side energy, essentially cooked in a lab until they resonated with the Force. These synthetic crystals often burned red and were even rumored to be more powerful or unstable than natural kyber, depending on how they were made.
While synthetic kyber hasn’t been re-canonized in a full-fledged way yet, The Acolyte and The High Republic are already playing with new kyber lore. So who’s to say we won’t see Force-users in canon cooking up their own crystal cores again?