Self-sacrificing assisted porous engineering: A general pathway for fast and stable lithium storage of yolk-shell metal sulfides

•A general strategy of self-sacrificing assisted porous engineering for efficient redox reactions of metal sulfides was presented and proved. By virtue of the engineered porous core and uniform shell, the intermediates dissolution and volume expansion are obviously alleviated, while ensuring fast reaction kinetics of metal sulfides.•The engineered porous-yolk@shell structure with optimized reaction kinetics by integrating the advantages of the yolk@shell and porous structures achieved both stable and fast lithium storage capabilities. As a representative, the porous-yolk@shell structured FeS exhibits a reversible capacity of 425 mAh/g after 1000 cycles at a current density of 0.5 A/g and a stable capacity of 321 mAh/g even at 10 A/g.•Significantly, this method has been successfully extended to other kind metal sulfides including Co9S8 and Ni3S2, which exhibit stable and fast lithium storage performance.