The default material

First of all, we should agree on what a Material is within Moonlight : a Material is a data collection enabling the software to render a surface or volume object with the appearence of a real material, like glass, gold or wood.

When you model an object other than a curve, it is made of a default grey material that helps only to visualize in a Preview window the obtained volume.
Moonlight call this material a "Inherit material" and the small box on the left of this topic is marked as is the following picture.

If you activate the material properties with >Edit.., the various parameters can be modiefied at will. But beware ! As this is the material explicitly called "Default", every mesh created thereafter will have the same modified look than the object called "shape-1" in the picture.