Find the missing letters

Question

This should be an easy puzzle.

Replace the x in the below with letters to make 6 valid 5-letters English words (no proper nouns or abbreviations) both vertically and horizontally.

This puzzle will be more fun if you only use a dictionary to validate your answers rather than use it to search for words that fit.

There may be more than one solution. However, the challenge is to use the least number of distinct characters to replace the xs.

Green tick to the first valid answer that uses the least numbers of letters.

C x D x T
x x x
R x T x R
x x x
D x R x S

Answer 1

A solution using the same pattern (only 2 letters):

C A D E T
A A A
R A T E R
E E E
D A R E S

Each are words of the form _ A _ E _

Just for the fun, here is one with 7 distinct letters.

C A D E T
U   E   U   
R O T O R
E   E   F  
D I R T S

Answer 2

One of the solutions. (Yes, there are multiple possible)

C A D E T
A E A
R O T O R
E E E
D A R E S

Although there were no constraints on the letters to be added, I chose to do it by replacing x only with vowels. So I managed to do it using only A, E and O.