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You don’t have to use tools in Minecraft. You could just punch trees and dirt and stop there. But you’d be missing out on a lot. Some blocks require an iron or diamond pickaxe to mine. You need a shovel to make paths and a hoe to till ground to grow crops. In other words, tools are required to succeed in Minecraft.

But you don’t need every tool all the time–leave the tilling tools and the enchantment table back at your base when you’re out exploring, but make sure you don’t leave home without a map. We’ve broken the most important tools of Minecraft down into a few discrete categories so that you know which tools you’ll need and when.

Tool Crafting Materials Ranked From Worst to Best

The first part of getting the right tools is knowing what to make them out of. The same way that a squeaky clown mallet isn’t great for construction work in real life, a soft golden sword isn’t going to last you long when the hordes come out a night.

The Basics for Mining and Building

These are the classics–the tools you’ll almost always want to have on you, from the classic pickaxe on down. These are the first tools you’ll build, and they’ll probably stay in your hotbar from hour 1 to hour 1000.

Navigating Your Way Through Minecraft

It’s hard to build a good base if you can’t find that base. Making sure you know how to get home is at least as important as building that home in the first place.

Tools for Long-Term Settlements

After hunting and foraging comes farming, both in the history of humankind and in the progression of Minecraft. Why hunt down forest beef when you could have sprawling fields of wheat ready to turn into bread and cake?

Tools For Item Maintenance

This is when the grind of Minecraft starts to slow down. Enchanting and repairing tools mean that you can make a piece of hardware last a long time. With the right enchantments, you can even make them last indefinitely.

Note: This guide focuses on the Bedrock version of Minecraft, available on Windows 10, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and mobile.

can be a huge grind depending on how you play it, and this grind puts off just as many potential Minecraft devotees as it attracts. With the right items, you can whittle that grind down and make Minecraft less about mining, more about crafting. An anvil takes a lot of resources, but the enchantment and renaming abilities make it worthwhile. Your first enchantment table will take a while to build, but its fuel–Lapis Lazuli and XP–are plentiful and easily gained, and both can turn your tools into reliable, long-term friends. To help you sustain yourself more effectively in the brutal world of Minecraft, we’ve compiled details around the game’s most useful tools that’ll help you do just that.

Anvil

You can repair any item at a Crafting Table, of course, but once you start working with enchanted items, you’ll want an anvil. It requires a lot of iron–31 ingots–but it allows you to repair enchanted items, combine enchantment books, and re-name items.

Grindstone

Having enchanted items is a huge step forward, but not every enchantment is useful. A Grindstone will let you remove any non-Curse enchantments from an item, while dumping a bit of XP in return. This is especially useful if you decide to start grinding with fishing as we talked about above.

Enchantment Table

Once you start really mining, you’re going to find so much Lapis Lazuli that you don’t know what to do with it. So what do you do with it? Enchant everything you own. An enchantment table, once built, requires a bit of Lapis Lazuli and some of your precious XP, but the right enchantments can turn a basic tool into a trusted one.

Note: This guide focuses on the Bedrock version of Minecraft, available on Windows 10, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and mobile.

Once you’ve established even a small base, you’ll want to start farming plants and animals alike to make a sustainable living space for yourself. These tools are often more delicate; a pair of shears can disintegrate in a few minutes depending on how you use it, and fishing rods degrade every time you cast your bobber out into the water. Below, we’ve compiled details on every farming tool in Minecraft.

Hoe

There are a bunch of different plants you can farm in Minecraft, including wheat, beats, sugar, and more–most of them require tilled ground, and that requires a hoe. Unlike with most of the other core tools, though, there’s little value in going past iron with a hoe. If you’re absolutely swimming in diamonds, then it’ll probably be the last hoe you’ll ever need, but you need to be truly Minecraft Wealthy to make that worthwhile. With that said, a hoe is indispensable for building a great base.

Shears

Wool has a variety of uses in Minecraft, including making beds, wool blocks, carpeting–great for limiting mob spawns–and if you manage to corral a couple of sheep, it’s easy to generate.

Lead

And the best way to get sheep back to your base is to grab the first two out in the wild and bring them back with a lead. A huge variety of mobs can be leashed for populating traditional animal farms as well as more complex Minecraft item farms

Fishing Rod

The fishing rod’s utility isn’t immediately apparent, but it’s secretly one of the most useful items in the game. While you can put a variety of enchantments on items by taking them to an enchantment table, you won’t be able to put Mending on your tools–an enchantment that will save you countless headaches as you get deeper into Minecraft. Pair a fishing rod with a good fishing spot (deep water, open space, and open sky), and you can start reeling in enchanted books, bows, and fishing rods. With the help of an anvil, you can enchant a fishing rod with Luck of the Sea III (better drops), Lure II (faster fishing), Unbreakable III and Mending I (slow degradation and self repair) that will pull in tons of useful enchantment books, not to mention an unlimited food supply.

Note: This guide focuses on the Bedrock version of Minecraft, available on Windows 10, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and mobile.

Losing your way in Minecraft can be frustrating. Even though world generation has improved in leaps and bounds over the years, it’s easy to get lost and convince yourself that your base is just past some trees–only to find yourself in a spruce forest after sundown. Fortunately, Minecraft has a few tools that can help you keep track of where you are in the world. Below, we detail all the major navigational tools in the game.

Compass

The compass is simple to build once you have a stone or iron pickaxe and, if you’re sticking close to your world spawn point, an absolutely crucial tool to find your way back home. Later, you can build a Lodestone and pair your compass with it to make it even more useful.

Maps & the Cartography Table

Don’t wait to start mapping. Minecraft is full of stunning vistas, villages and fortresses full of rare blocks and items, and other things worth finding again. If you start a map early on, you’ll have no problem finding your way back to that gorgeous mesa or lush jungle biome you finally found after too much searching.

You can build a regular old vanilla map, of course, but if you combine a piece of paper with a compass at a cartography table, it becomes a Locator Map, which shows your location on the sheet. Combine a map with a blank piece of paper, and you’ll get a zoomed-out version–there are four different levels of zoom to use. You can even turn them into art by placing the map in a wall frame so that you can see your glorious handiwork from a bird’s eye view.

Clock

The clock is one of the less useful tools in Minecraft but still has its purpose. If you’re spending a lot of time mining, and especially if you’re doing so on a Minecraft realm or Survival Multiplayer server, knowing what time of day it is helps you know when you can deploy your portable bed and refresh yourself.

Note: This guide focuses on the Bedrock version of Minecraft, available on Windows 10, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and mobile.

If fighting games have taught us anything, it’s that punching stuff is lots of fun. But that’ll only get you so far in Minecraft–you’re going to need the right tools to get the job done. Even if you know the basics–grab your pickaxe, shovel, and axe–there’s a whole world of complexity to get lost in. In this guide, we’ll lay out all the tools you need to survive and thrive in Minecraft, what you can build them out of, and how to make the most of them. These items should almost always be in your inventory, as they are the most useful, versatile, and common tools in Minecraft.

Pickaxe

The absolute first tool you should built when getting started. While it’s not terribly useful right on the surface where dirt and wood are the most common blocks, it’s likely the tool you’ll have in your hand the most. It’s also crucial for attaining exotic blocks like diamond, obsidian, and Ancient Debris.

Axe

The trusty axe is good for one thing and one thing only, but it does its job better than anything else. Having a good stock of wood is a good first step toward building a good-looking home base for yourself, and it’s one of the most versatile blocks in the game. Alternatively, you can punch trees, of course, but your time is worth more than that.

Shovel

Like the axe, the shovel is more limited, being useful for mining softer blocks like dirt, sand, and gravel. Above ground, it’s a great way to terraform an area to your liking, Below ground, it’s crucial for getting all that gravel out of your way. Additionally, the shovel has a secondary action (right-click or left trigger) that lets you make a pathway on grass–a great way to make a space look more civilized or ensure that you can find your way back somewhere.

Crafting Table

This is where the magic happens. With just one block of wood, broken down into four wooden planks, you can build a crafting table, the place where virtually all Minecraft’s many items come to life. One of these should always be in your inventory.

SPOILER WARNING: Be careful! No More Heroes 3 is a game filled with surprises, and sometimes boss fights don’t always go as expected. In other words, we recommend not reading the boss strategy until you’ve actually started fighting the boss to avoid spoiling some of the game’s best moments!

Another returning character comes to upstage the guy you’re supposed to fight in No More Heroes 3’s Rank 4 fight. Destroyman has returned, and he has brought some friends. Or rather, a gaggle of mass-produced, mechanized clones of himself. Below, you can find out everything you need to know about defeating Destroyman. For more guides, be sure to check out our No More Heroes 3 beginner’s tips.

How To Defeat Destroyman

The first phase of this fight sees Travis taking on a group of Destroymen. This fight isn’t terribly difficult–at this point, the health and attack power of the Destroyman units is weak compared to the standard foes you’re fighting in Defense Missions and Designated Matches. They fight with very straightforward close-range attacks, which are rather easy to Perfect Dodge and counter. What can prove to be a bit of a problem are their sheer numbers–when you’ve dealt with one group, another will immediately appear. All you need to do is keep fighting until you’ve slain enough of them to trigger the next few story scenes.

The back half of the Destroyman encounter is where the real fight begins. Destroyman True-Face has a mix of close- and long-range attacks that can be a royal pain to deal with. For close-range strikes, he’s got a bunch combo, a twirling-twin-blade attack, an electrified uppercut, and On the ranged side, he can lunge at you with a flying tackle or punch, send lightning blasts coursing along the ground, and fire twin blasts from a homing cannon. The homing attack can be dodged when you see the blasts barrelling down at you, but the lighting attack is a bit trickier: For the first new attack, he will charge up, then fire lighting blasts that shoot across the ground in straight lines around him. You’ll have a second or two to spot where the lightning will move, then get out of the way.

He gains another ranged attack when he’s down to half his life. This new skill, the Destroy Buster, has him fly into the air, then fire a scraping laser that tracks Travis. You’ll need to keep moving through the duration of this attack to avoid being hit. Try to lure the beam to the left or right edge of the arena before it blasts, then quickly move out of the way as it fires and keep running. Be careful because getting blasted against the wall with this will absolutely wreck your life meter! He’ll also upgrade his Destroy Cannon to be able to fire huge energy blasts that cover a decent-sized area, though these don’t doggedly home in on you as the smaller blasts do. (You’ll also see him charge up briefly, giving ample time to dodge.)

All of your Death Glove skills can be put to good use here, particularly the Death Kick, which can interrupt some of his more annoying attacks. Since he’s humanoid-sized, he’s also very vulnerable to stuns and throws, so if you see him getting close to getting dizzy, don’t let up! A good overall strategy is to try and Perfect Dodge his bodily strikes since a successful dodge will set you up in slow-mo for a big counterattack, which can then lead to a dizzy state. There are also times when he won’t be attacking and will walk towards you–try charging up your heavy attack (a skill learned from the Power-Up Machine) and let it loose when he’s close for a good chunk of damage. Keep your guards and dodges at the ready, and you should be able to ground this would-be hero for good.

The Rocketeer will blast onto Disney+ in a new exclusive film titled, The Return of the Rocketeer.

Deadline reports that Disney will revive the 1991 classic film with the help of producers Jessica and David Oyelowo, the latter of whom may also potentially star in the project as well. Oyelowo is best known for playing Martin Luther King Jr. in 2014’s Selma.

The Return of the Rocketeer will be a reboot for the hero where he will be a retired Tuskegee airman that ends up becoming the titular hero.

Ed Ricourt will write the new Rocketeer movie having previously written hits like Now You See Me, as well as on shows like Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Raising Dion.

The 1991 original Rocketeer movie was directed by Captain America: The First Avenger helmer Joe Johnston and was based on a graphic novel about a young pilot who becomes a masked hero that flies around in a jetpack.

Despite underperforming at the box office, The Rocketeer has built itself a cult following thanks to its old-fashioned storytelling style and classic influences. No wonder Marvel tapped Johnston to direct the first Captain America movie, a similarly old-fashioned superhero story

Check out IGN’s Rocketeer review where we praise its throwback style and sensibilities.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

SPOILER WARNING: Be careful! No More Heroes 3 is a game filled with surprises, and sometimes boss fights don’t always go as expected. In other words, we recommend not reading the boss strategy until you’ve actually started fighting the boss to avoid spoiling some of the game’s best moments!

Midori Midorikawa is quite the odd duck. She greets you with a long rambling self-introduction, has two “talking” hands, controls elemental powers, and has decided that, before you fight her, you’re going to have to trudge your way through a first-person schoolhouse-turned-hellhouse. Creepy? Very. Weird? Oh hell yes. Difficult? Hmmm, maybe not quite so much as some of your previous fights. Below, you can find out how to defeat Midori Midorikawa. For more guides, be sure to check out our No More Heroes 3 beginner’s tips.

How To Defeat Midori Midorikawa

From the start, carefully follow the glowing green orb through the structure. It will take you up a flight of stairs and, eventually, it will phase through a set of double doors that you can’t open. From here, you can go either left or right. To the right is a restroom with a save point and a warp back to the motel. If you go left, you’ll encounter several open classrooms, some of which contain an enemy fight inside. Should you go all the way down the left hall, you’ll loop back to the right side of the hall where the restroom is.

The key to opening the double doors is to go inside all of the classrooms, see if enemies attack, and then kill them all. Once you clear all of these encounters, the double doors will open and let you progress to actual one-on-one combat with Midori.

When you actually get to fight Midori herself, you’ve got one hell of an advantage–a fully armored Travis! While you can’t use any sushi items or Death Glove skills in Full Green Mode, you likely won’t even need to because this thing’s an absolute beast. Most of the face-button controls are the same, though you can now hover by holding down the B button, and the dodge-roll has turned into a boosted sprint. The big changes are on the L and R buttons: L will activate your missile volley (same as the skill you get from suiting up after getting all 7s on the Slash Reel), while R performs an incredibly powerful Tiger Attack–think the Death Kick, but even better. These take a while to recharge after use, however!

Midori is primarily a ranged fighter who tries to keep you at a distance with lasers and projectiles. The key is to find an opening to get in and deal damage. She’ll use the power of wind and fire to keep you at bay, targeting you with massive fire lasers, whipping up a miniature tornado to blast off at you, or summoning multiple fireballs to bounce around the arena. Many of her attacks are straightforward to dodge, but her sheer speed can make her hard to catch up to. The bigger threats are the floor hazards left behind by her bouncing fireball attack and aerial fireball attacks, which linger on the ground for a very long time and can tick off Travis’s life should you carelessly zoom into them. And, lest you think she’s just a ranged fighter, she can surprise you with a slashing close-range counterattack when you’ve closed the gap, so stay on your toes.

When she’s down to half of her life, she’ll start using a new attack where she’ll fire numerous wind or fire blades around her body in a wide radius. The “tell” is when she hovers in the air, and a white or flaming circle forms around her. You can easily avoid these by jumping and hovering until the attack ends.

Even if you find yourself having trouble getting in, if you can stall long enough to have your L and R attacks recharge, you can rely on those to deal a lot of damage to Midori. Keep an eye out for hazards, and this fight should be fairly simple.

Peacock has revealed the 10 series regulars for its upcoming Vampire Academy show. It also revealed new details about the series based on the young adult novels of the same name written by Richelle Mead.

Vampire Academy is centered on exactly what the name implies, an academy for fledgling vampires, and it will be filled with romance, friendship, death, sex, scandal, drama, and more.

“St. Vladimir’s Academy isn’t just any boarding school — It’s a hidden place where vampire royals are educated and half-human teens train to protect them from the savage ‘Strigoi’ vampires who would like to see them destroyed,” Peacock’s description for the series reads. “In a world of privilege and glamour, two young women’s friendship transcends their strikingly different classes as they prepare to complete their education and enter royal vampire society.”

The description continues and says Vampire Academy combines the “elegance of aristocratic romance” with the “supernatural thrills” found in the vampire genre.

Alongside these new Vampire Academy details, Peacock also revealed 10 of the series regulars:

• Sisi Stringer (Mortal Kombat) has been cast to play Rose Hathaway, a vampire-human hybrid known as a Dhampir, who is fiery, outspoken, the strongest fighter in her class, and always ready to jump into action.

• Daniela Nieves (Sex Appeal, Five Points) will play Lissa Dragomir, a Royal Moroi vampire who is the heir apparent to Princess Vasilisa Dragomire and a carefree, kind-hearted, princess uninterested in the politics of her family’s royal court.

• Kieron Moore (Masters of the Air, Sex Education) has been cast to play Dimitri Belikov, the model of a Dhampir guardian who is lethal, disciplined, discreet, and committed to his role as a bodyguard to the ruling Moroi vampires.

• Andre Dae Kim (Degrassi, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) will play Christian Ozera, a Royal Moroi vampire who is intelligent, thoughtful, and a pariah of the academy as a result of his parent’s unforgivable societal sins.

• J. August Richards (Angel, Generation) has been cast to play Victor Dashkov, a noble Moroi vampire with a heart of gold who is a well-regarded advisor, loyalist, and political strategist to the Moroi dignitaries.

• Anita-Joy Uwajeh (West End’s Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear) will play Tatiana Vogel, a Moroi vampire and political underdog plotting to slowly take the royal court by storm.
• Mia McKenna-Bruce (West End’s Billy Elliot The Musical, The Dumping Ground) has been cast to play Mia Karp, a St. Vladimir’s Academy student who is witty, cutting, ruthless, and someone who’s not a member of royalty with big plans to eventually become someone in the royal court.

• Rhian Blundell (Torchwood: Believe, Doctor Who: The Dread of Night) will play Meredith, a smart Dhampir who’s described as a keen observer, excellent strategist, and valuable asset.

• Jonetta Kaiser (Tales, Breakwater) has been cast to play Sonya Karp, a quiet, careful, and odd Moroi vampire who sits on the fringe of society void of any royal blood.

• Andrew Liner (Grown-ish) will play Mason Ashford, a charming, loyal, and popular guardian-in-training who is Rose’s main competition to become the best guardian out there.

Peacock also revealed that Julie Plec, the director of The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Legacies, will serve as the showrunner for the first season of Vampire Academy, and she’ll write and direct some episodes too. Marguerite MacIntyre will executive produce the series alongside Plec, Emily Cummins, Don Murphy, Susan Montford, Deepak Nayar, and Jillian DeFrehn.

Other directors include Billie Woodruff, Luis Prieto, Jesse Warn, Erica Dunton, and Geoff Shotz. A release date for Vampire Academy has not yet been revealed.

Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.