This guide will explain how to combine specific cosmetic items in the game to make your mainhand lightsaber almost completely invisible.
Note: There is no official way to hide your mainhand weapon completely in SWTOR without significantly reducing your maximum potential in combat. However, certain cosmetic items can be cleverly combined to get convincingly close to that ideal.
The lightsaber of a Sith Sorcerer or Jedi Sage is infamously referred to as a “stat stick” because they only possess a lightsaber attack, Saber Strike. The attack is one of your starting abilities and deals a paltry amount of weapon damage because it does not cost any Force and is considered your “basic attack”, a concept that has almost no practical implications in SWTOR.
Long before you are given a lightsaber at the end of your origin story on Tython or Korriban, Saber Strike becomes worthless, as all of your other attacks are stronger and can be activated from much further away.
To my knowledge, there is but a single example in all of the canon visual depictions of lightsaber combat where anybody summoned Force Lightning while their lightsaber was ignited, and it took place in Yoda’s Force vision. We didn’t even learn that Palpatine had a lightsaber until Revenge of the Sith, as he never used one in the original trilogy!
On the light side, the waters are a tad muddier, but Jedi are more likely to put away or turn off their lightsaber the greater feat they perform alongside the Force.
Despite the complete lack of canonical support, most of your Sorcerer | Sage abilities cannot be activated at all unless you equip one, and even the abilities that remain usable without a saber equipped are substantially weaker because you’d have to give up one of the most important pieces of gear to do it.
Why Sorcerers and Sages Require Lightsabers in SWTOR
The proper way to solve this canonical dispute would involve changing the Sorcerer and Sage weapon proficiencies to allow you to equip Focuses as both your mainhand and offhand weapons, but the devs have not done so.
It made a lot more sense for the game to work like this when there were more shared abilities between classes, and you didn’t select your advanced class until level 10. Nowadays, we have second combat styles and limited shared abilities, while combat style selection is part of the character creation process, so it doesn’t make nearly as much sense anymore.
Given that it has remained one of the most popular cosmetic requests over the years, the devs likely continue to be required only because of cutscenes featuring baked-in lightsaber combat for all Force users. Still, I suspect the devs could get around this little snag by adopting the same approach used for Troopers and Agents, where the player character uses an uncustomizable blaster pistol for such cutscenes.
They could probably even circumvent the lack of customization by tweaking the mainhand and offhand for affected origin stories and pulling in the offhand weapon for relevant cutscenes, including making the lightsaber an offhand and Focus for the mainhand for Sorcerers and Sages.
If Broadsword wanted to retain the concept of a basic attack, they could easily make Lightning Strike or Consuming Darkness | Disturbance or Vindicate fill that same role.
How to Hide Your Lightsaber in SWTOR
All you’ll need to hide your lightsaber is to combine 3 specific cosmetic items available on the Cartel Market or GTN. There isn’t any sort of hacking or cheating required; it’s 100% organic, grass-fed, free-range, non-GMO, legitimate character customization.
| Icon | Item Name |
|---|---|
 | Zakuulan Practice Saber (Vibrosword) |
 | Holographic Weapon Tuning |
 | Advanced White-Black Crystal (Any) |
The key idea is that the VFX applied by the Holographic Weapon Tuning will apply to the entirety of most vibroswords, not just (part of) the hilt as it does for lightsabers.
The White-Black Color Crystal is just the hardest to see in these conditions, resulting in some vibroswords losing almost all of their opacity.
This trick works for any Force-wielding combat style, though it will look weird to perform most of your attacks with an invisible weapon.
In actual combat, the saber is almost entirely invisible. Your eyes are distracted by all of the other, far more vibrant colors appearing on your screen. Don’t forget that so far, all you’ve seen are close-ups. From a distance, you’ll just see a faint silhouette.
The Ancient Sith Lord’s Warblade and Ancient Force-Imbued Blade almost entirely disappear as well and blend in better while sheathed. The biggest drawback of using the Zakuulan Practice Saber is that the holographic effect turns off when it’s sheathed, and you’re left carrying around a stick on your back.
The other blades I mentioned also match their respective combat styles far better from a thematic perspective, so you may prefer better if the remaining visibility bothers you. That being said, they are significantly more expensive, and the blade part is more visible than it is with this weapon.
If you can snag a Fitted Refined Efficient Enzo Saber from the GTN, that’s even better, but they’re pretty rare and extremely expensive. It’s a lightsaber that’s bugged and doesn’t emit a blade at all.
Most of the blueish crystals with nonstandard core colors also work pretty well. In particular, Mauve subtly matches the color of Force Lightning, evoking the idea that your Focus is actually doing something. However, these colors are more prominent, so you basically have to decide whether you’re going to ignore the occasional holographic glint or lean into it with a thematic color.
Acknowledgments and Special Thanks
I want to give a shoutout to Vyrn for showing me how to do this a while ago, back before the Zakuulan Practice Saber was released. The detail on the Ancient Sith Lord’s Warblade was appropriate, but still too visible. It was a ghost sword, not an invisible one. The Zakuulan Practice Saber really makes this dream a reality.
If you’re interested in learning how to play Sorcerer or Sage, I encourage you to check out our up-to-date 7.0 SWTOR Class Guides for each discipline!
If you want something simpler that’s designed to offer a far more enjoyable experience in solo content, we also have dedicated Solo Build Guides for all DPS disciplines, including ones for Sith Sorcerer or Jedi Sage. These guides cover the best ability tree talents, tacticals, implants, and combos to take out all of that trash littered about in between the cutscenes.
