Crafting materials are the raw ingredients behind every recipe at the Forge. Shadowrealm has 20 distinct materials spread across the same five rarity tiers as gear itself, common, rare, epic, legendary, and mythic, and they drop from actions and heists as you play. Rarer recipes lean on rarer materials, so climbing the rarity ladder on gear usually means stockpiling the matching tier of materials first.
Every material in the game reaches a character through one of three routes: a random drop from a successful action or heist, a straight gold purchase at the Reliquary, or a lucky roll on the Black Market. None of the three is strictly better: drops are free but unreliable, the Reliquary is reliable but limited by server-wide stock, and the Black Market is a single random item that might not even be the tier or item you need. All three feed the same sink, though: the Forge, where materials of the right rarity turn directly into gear.
Rarer materials are dramatically scarcer at every step of that chain: lower drop odds, a smaller Reliquary stock cap, and a steeper Black Market price, which is exactly why the highest rarities of gear stay out of reach until a character has put in real time. See the Gear Catalog for what all of that material eventually buys.
A successful action or heist rolls for a bonus material drop on top of its normal gold and XP reward, checking the rarest tier first so a lucky roll can never be crowded out by a more common one landing first. Each tier has its own independent base chance: Common 30%, Rare 8%, Epic 3%, Legendary 0.5%, Mythic 0.05%. Luck raises all five at once: every point of Luck above the starting value of 5 multiplies every tier's drop chance by another 1%, with no cap other than certainty itself, so a high-Luck build sees noticeably better material returns from the exact same actions.
The Reliquary is a gold vendor for materials: no drop roll, no Luck involved, just a listed price per rarity tier. Its catch is scarcity rather than randomness, every tier keeps a small server-wide stock that sells out and refills on a fixed clock, and each player is capped on how many units of a tier they can buy per window, so it smooths out bad drop luck rather than replacing farming outright. Every price below is a baseline: like every other gold vendor in the game, the Reliquary scales its prices up by a server-wide inflation multiplier that rises with the gold in circulation and never drops below 1x, so the live price can sit well above what is quoted here.
The Black Market rotates a single random item, gear, a potion, or a material, every 20 to 28 hours, so you cannot shop for a specific material there, only check back and buy it if the right one happens to show up. When a material does roll, it prices out at roughly half of the Reliquary's per-unit rate for the same rarity, a real discount if the timing lines up (that ratio holds regardless of inflation, since the same multiplier scales both vendors); the baseline prices below are likewise before that same server-wide inflation multiplier.
Common materials drop at a base 30% chance per successful action or heist, before Luck. The 6 materials below are all pure crafting ingredients, consumed by the recipe they match rather than used or equipped on their own.
Rare materials drop at a base 8% chance per successful action or heist, before Luck. The 5 materials below are all pure crafting ingredients, consumed by the recipe they match rather than used or equipped on their own.
Epic materials drop at a base 3% chance per successful action or heist, before Luck. The 4 materials below are all pure crafting ingredients, consumed by the recipe they match rather than used or equipped on their own.
Legendary materials drop at a base 0.5% chance per successful action or heist, before Luck. The 3 materials below are all pure crafting ingredients, consumed by the recipe they match rather than used or equipped on their own.
Mythic materials drop at a base 0.05% chance per successful action or heist, before Luck. The 2 materials below are all pure crafting ingredients, consumed by the recipe they match rather than used or equipped on their own.