The Most Powerful Star Wars Force Abilities Explained

By Zack Zagranis | Updated 1 year ago

When it comes to the Star Wars universe, nothing is more powerful than the Force. Essentially an energy field created by all living creatures, the Force is the glue that binds the galaxy together and allows the Jedi and the Sith to do all those crazy flips and stuff. It’s the “and stuff” we’re going to talk about here because some Force abilities are so OP they need to be seen…er…read to be believed.

Thought Bomb

Let’s start with one of the most powerful, though little-known, Force abilities ever—the thought bomb. The thought bomb is so overpowered that it was only a thing in Legends, and even then only used by the ancient Sith and only a few times.

The thought bomb requires several unified Sith Lords to perform a ritual that gathers all their hate and anger into a giant sphere of evil. When detonated, the bomb completely annihilates any Force-sensitive being caught within its blast radius.

The thought bomb dissolves the physical bodies of any Force users present and absorbs their fragmented souls into what Wookieepedia calls “a swirling vortex of perpetual torment that resolved into an orb of silver iridescence.” In other words, the thought bomb was a fate worse than death.

Unfortunately, the thought bomb destroyed any Force user in its vicinity, meaning the Sith generating it were in just as much danger as their enemies. Hence why the thought bomb isn’t the go-to move for most practitioners of the Dark Side of the Force. Although, killing yourself just to own the Jedi is possibly the most Sith thing imaginable.

Shatterpoint

Shatterpoint is a Force ability that allows Force users to sense an object—or living being’s—weak point and then exploit it through the Force. This could be as simple as sensing the weakness in a Storm Trooper’s armor and then pulling it apart through Force telekinesis or as complex as finding scars and healed wounds on an enemy and then violently ripping them open.

Shatterpoint has the potential to be the goriest, nastiest Force ability in Star Wars, which is probably why no Force users have ever been shown using the ability in the franchise’s live-action TV shows or movies.

Force Ghost

Some of Star Wars’ most powerful Force abilities can only be performed using the light side of the force, Sith need not apply. Becoming a Force ghost is one such ability. One of the first Force powers seen on screen, retaining one’s consciousness after death is no easy feat which is why we only see a handful of Force ghosts throughout the Star Wars saga.

Traditionally in Star Wars, when someone dies, they become one with the Force. Through special training, however, Force-sensitives like Qui-Gon Jinn could learn to achieve spiritual immortality.

Only by following a strict code of selflessness and sacrifice could a Jedi will their body to disappear completely upon their deathbed and transcend the physical world while maintaining the ability to interact with it occasionally.

Some Force, ghosts like Yoda, had a strong enough will to manipulate physical objects after death, like when the pint-sized Jedi Master caused a bolt of lightning to set a tree on fire in The Last Jedi.

Force Drain/Essence Transfer

Given that Dark Siders in Star Wars can’t become Force Ghosts, the Sith worked hard on coming up with their own version of Immortality, one where they could retain a corporeal form.

This includes everything from creating life-preserving potions through ancient Sith alchemy to literally draining the life force directly from another living creature in order to heal or simply prolong one’s life.

Force drain allowed Sith Lords to extend their lives for centuries past their natural life span, but no matter how long you avoid it, death still comes for us all eventually. That’s why the Sith came up with a radical dark side Force power known as essence transfer.

Basically, through sheer hatred and darkness, a Sith could transfer their consciousness into another body or even an object. Ancient Sith would hide their consciousness in the walls of their tomb and wait, sometimes for centuries, for someone to come along.

When someone finally did, the Sith Lord would possess the other body in order to continue their evil schemes.

By the time of Emporer Palpatine, the preferred method was to use clones—usually younger, un-corrupted copies of the Sith Lord themselves—as vessels for essence transfer. As we saw in The Rise of Skywalker, a desperate Sith would use their own grandkids for force drain or essence transfer in a pinch.

Or maybe devouring family to preserve their own life was actually their preference. They don’t call it the Dark Side for nothing.

Psychometry

If you’ve ever wondered what was going on with Rey when she picked up Luke’s old lightsaber in The Force Awakens and started hearing voices, that was an example of psychometry, a Force ability that allows the user to sense an object’s history, including where it was or who held it last, just by touching it.

Unlike most Force powers that require instruction and practice to learn, psychometry can’t be taught. A Force user has to be born with the ability making it a sought-after skill among Star Wars’ various Force-using organizations. Though an innate skill, a user still needed to practice psychometry in order to master it.

Untrained individuals touching certain objects would get more than just visions. They could also suffer severe headaches and violent seizures if not accustomed to using the power.

Force Lightning

Another Force ability used exclusively by the Dark Side is Force Lightning. A staple of Star Wars baddies ever since the Emperor first shot it out of his fingertips in Return of the Jedi, Force Lightning is a devastating attack consisting of crackling bolts of electric blue energy spewed continuously from the user’s hands.

This lightning, made of pure force energy, can incapacitate an enemy and slowly kill them, all the while inflicting excruciating pain. It takes a real cruelness and a fetish for enjoying the pain of others to use Force Lightning which is why, though physically capable, no self-respecting Light Side Force user will touch the stuff.

Force Choke

One power the good guys in Star Wars weren’t afraid to use, oddly, was the force choke ability. Force choking a victim simply meant using the Force to telekinetically close another being’s windpipe, restricting their ability to breathe and often killing them.

While the force choke is most famously associated with Darth Vader, both Luke and Yoda have also force-choked enemies on the big screen—although not to the point of death—proving that Jedi might not be willing to electrocute someone, but they won’t hesitate to choke a Sith if provoked.

Force Projection

Imagine the ability to project a copy of yourself across the galaxy mentally. That’s what Luke Skywalker did in The Last Jedi in order to distract his nephew and allow his sister and her friends to escape certain death. Force projection takes so much concentration and skill to pull off that it can literally kill the user, making it a very rare Force ability that only a few Jedi or Sith have ever attempted.

Luke himself expended all of his life energy, projecting a mental clone of himself across millions of lightyears of open space leading to the hero’s own peaceful demise at the end of The Last Jedi.

Creation of Life

“The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.”— Chancellor Palpatine.

There are lots of offensive Force powers that allow the Sith to commit horrific acts of death and destruction across the entire Star Wars galaxy, but if you want real power, nothing beats the ability to create life from scratch. According to Darth Sidious, his master Darth Plagueis discovered a way to manipulate midi-chlorians in a way that allowed him to create life from nothing.

This practice was so unnatural that the Force itself created Anakin Skywalker in order to mock Sidious and Plagueis’s attempts at creating life. How complex the life forms Darth Plagueis created were is unknown, but just the ability to pervert the force and create a life of your own, no matter how big or small, is easily the most powerful feat a Jedi or Sith has ever managed in Star Wars history.