How to get Shadow in Hades 2

✓ At A Glance

• You can get Shadow by crafting it in the cauldron at the Crossroads.
• The recipe costs x30 Psyche, x30 Ashes, and x3 Fate Fabric to make x1 Shadow.

You’ll have to gather a vast array of resources to make meaningful progress as you venture through the Underworld and the surface. The rogue-like game can be punishing, so every little bit of bought power helps. The ways to get resources is as numerous as the resources themselves, and some are harder to get than others. One of the more complicated resources to unlock and get is Shadow.

Where to find Shadow in Hades 2

Shadow is not a harvested resource like Bronze or Thalamus. Instead, you can get Shadow by concocting it using an Incantation at the Cauldron within the Crossroads. To get Shadow, you will first need to progress through the game a bit. You’ll need to meet the Pantheon of Olympian gods that grant you Boons, meet Chaos, and finally speak with Hecate to get the recipe to appear in the Cauldron’s Alchemy tab.

Shadow Extraction Incantation recipe

The alchemy recipe to cast the Shadow Extraction spell at the Cauldron calls for:

• x30 Psyche
• x30 Ashes
• x3 Fate Fabric

You’ll get Psyche by clearing encounters in Erebus, buying them with the Wretched Broker for x30 Bones, or completing the Lost Shades mini-game once you’ve crafted the Tablet of Peace. Similarly, you can get Ashes by clearing Erebus encounters and buying them from the Wretched Broker for x15 Bones. 

Lastly, the most difficult component of the spell is finding Fate Fabric. This resource can’t be found out in the world, and is only sometimes a reward for fulfilling prophecies from the Fated List. However, the easiest way to get them is to buy them from Wretched Broker for 60 Bones apiece.

✓ Pro tip

If you want to get Fate Fabric for free (used to make Shadow), pick the Onyx Dress when you meet Arachne in Erebus.

After collecting all the necessary ingredients, you can concost the Shadow Extraction at the cauldron. But you won’t get Shadow right away; takes 12 Encounters until the Shadow is ready.

What is Shadow used for

The main use for Shadow is as a component to make the Permeation of Witching-Wards Incantation, which removes the barrier to Warded Gateways and opens the way to the surface. The full recipe requires:

• x1 Cinder
• x1 Molly
• x1 Shadow

There are only two more uses for Shadow in the current version of the game. Going back to the Cauldron, you will find an Alchemy recipe to craft Moon Dust, which is used to upgrade Arcana Cards. This recipe takes:

• x1 Cinder
• x1 Shadow

Another way you can use Shadow later in the game is to upgrade Melinoe’s Grasp of the Arcana, which allows her to use more Arcane Cards. The costs for this vary depending on your current Grasp level. Hopefully, Supergiant will add more recipes involving Shadow in future updates to Hades 2. If and when that happens, we will make sure to update our guide with any further uses for this rare ingredient.