Fortnite Shadowshard Crystal can be a crafting material, utilized to produce all Star Level four Fortnite weapons. They can be generally found in caves in Twine Peaks and rarely appear in caves in Canny Valley. They could also look in both Twine Peaks and Canny Valley Storm Chests and randomly appear as mission rewards.

As previously talked about, the Shadowshard Crystal is made use of to make Crystal Weapons, not the natural Quartz Crystal which can also be spotted in caves and mountains. Obtaining Shadowshard and keeping it on hand is usually a necessity if a player desires to upgrade to a Crystal Weapon. Furthermore, Fortnite fans should realize that Crystal Weapons are side-grades of Epic/Legendary Weapons, which explains why they're listed as Level 30 inside the Collection Book. As you make your weapons stronger and stronger using the game's weapon evolution system, you'll be needed to make use of different Fortnite materials to make them a lot more potent. When you reach tier 4, you'll have the choice of applying Shadowshard Crystal to receive a crystal weapon. Other folks may well also use Malachite, which is also utilized for crystal weapons in Fortnite.

NO.1 When Opting to "Shadowshard," your weapon will result in
20% increase to base damage
10% decrease in fire rate
20% decrease in weapon durability

NO.2 The Damage Obsidian Ore VS Shadowshard Crystal
Damage is one of my priority concerns, so this is a right angle to kick off the analysis. To find out the impact of Shadowsharding, we compare the damage values of one of my favorite weapons, the Hydra. The Hydra is picked due to its fixed yet extremely mediocre selection of perks. Keying in the values into my table like this, we get
Shadowshard Hydra with 1417.09 DMG/Shot and 2131.44 DPS
Obsidian Hydra with 1180.91 DMG/Shot and 1903.44 DPS
Overall, this translates towards the Shadowshard Hydra winning in DMG/Shot by 20% and in DPS by 11.98%. This does not inform us much for the reason that all along, we knew that Shadowshard outcomes in additional harm. On the other hand, we can examine the effects of heroes on this difference by assuming various loadouts using the setup. In the event, the player runs
Special Forces, the difference in TDPS falls to 10.66%
Urban Assault Headhunter, the difference in TDPS increases to 12.49%
Shock Trooper, the difference in TDPS drops to 11.14%
As you can see here, the effectiveness of Shadowsharding a weapon is dependent on your loadout. Heroes with more fire rate get more DPS out of Shadowsharding their guns whereas heroes with more damage scaling get less out of it. But what about the weapon we are using? Does that matter? To find out, we substitute Hydra with a Weapons with a higher fire rate such as the Nocturno. In this scenario which looks like this,
Shadowshard Nocturno with 336.84 DMG/Shot and 2115.07 DPS
Obsidian Nocturno with 280.70 DMG/Shot and 1871.36 DPS
In this case, the Shadowshard Nocturno has 13.02% more TDPS than its Obsidian counterpart. Noticed the trend yet? I went one step further and dumped a 50% fire rate perk onto both Nocturnos and guess what, the TDPS difference increased to 14.23% In other words, weapons with more fire rate benefit more from Shadowshard.

NO.3 The Disclaimers Obsidian Ore VS Shadowshard Crystal
With all analyses, there exist caveats and scenarios where my studies would not apply to specific groups of people. For example
Someone who spends proportionately more time farming than playing would end up with more than enough of a particular resource, at which point he could just run that single resource and not care about efficiency
Someone who doesn't have specific element weapons does not have the option to Shadowshard 3 separate weapons of each component and may instead opt for a different setup
Someone who doesn't care about efficiency at all and wants their best gun as healthy as possible wouldn't care about splitting the resources evenly either (I know a lot of people Shadowshard their Hydra)
Someone who plays in a group where you resource and even schematic share guns would have different players in the group leveling up different element specific weapons
There are many other situations I could think of but listing them all is relatively meaningless especially since you guys should get the point by now.

NO.4 The Conclusion Obsidian Ore VS Shadowshard Crystal
So far, we learned that
Weapons with more fire rate benefit more from Shadowshard
Shadowshard is always less "efficient per craft" than Obsidian
Resource availability is important, and you should evenly distribute your resources
While how the player eventually decides to allocate their resources is entirely up to their preference, the "efficient way I would recommend" is to Obsidian an energy weapon and Shadowshard 3 separate element specific weapons. However, the optimal way (if you don't care about resources) is to Shadowshard everything.

NO.5 The Efficiency Obsidian Ore VS Shadowshard Crystal
Shadowsharding a weapon is not only about giving it extra damage at the expense of some fire rate. A Shadowshard gun also has less durability, 20% less to be precise. To evaluate the influence of this reduced durability, we will need to consider just how much damage can it place out within a single craft. Luckily, I already possess a table set up for that and even updated my ranged weapon table using the durability cost/shot (new feature Bois). And before you ask, yes distinct weapons do cost diverse amounts of durability/ shot
If we look in the Nocturnos in this table here, we see that the Shadowshard Nocturno (left) offers less damage per craft as compared to the Obsidian Nocturno (appropriate) although we established earlier that the Shadowshard Nocturno wins in each Damage/Shot and TDPS. The precise difference comes out to become four.17% in favor of the Obsidian Nocturno.
It's worth mentioning that this distinction doesn't take into account fire rate at all, so we're merely comparing the damage/shot against the total durability for both weapons
We do not stop right here and alternatively go back to examine the Hydra for comparison sake. Not surprisingly, the efficiency difference comes out to become specifically four.17%. Final but not least, we're going to examine the Hydra against the Nocturno inefficiency, each before and just after Shadowsharding. It looks a thing like this table.

NO.6 Condition Nocturno Hydra Difference
Obsidian 2.105M 1.982M 5.81%
Shadowshard 2.021M 1.903M 5.81%
What we can take away from these comparisons is that Shadowshard will always be less efficient regarding damage/ clip as compared to Obsidian