Colour carries depth — shadows are the exception
Standard containers never carry a shadow. Depth comes from stepping through the container colour ramp, which keeps surfaces flat, crisp, and legible against the page floor. Only surfaces that genuinely float above the page — anchored overlays and modals — earn a shadow, and there are exactly two tokens for that. Never write a literal box-shadow value in component CSS.
Shadow tokens
Both tokens are defined per theme, with stronger opacity in dark mode so they still read against the #050505 floor.
Depth without shadows
Everything below the floating layer expresses hierarchy through background steps. A nested surface reads as deeper because it is a shade further along the ramp, not because it is lifted.
The one exception
Interactive Card and EntityCard navigation tiles lift on hover. That shadow is a deliberate navigational affordance — a signal that the whole tile is clickable — not an elevation pattern to copy onto static containers.