Yes you can. There's Adventure Mode with monsters and shit or Creative Mode where you can fly, have infinite everything and is the videogame equivalent of Lego.

No you do not need a server. You can play locally on your own or host a server from your own PC to play with people you know. Or, there are plenty of free servers (many with amazing pre-built worlds to explore - if you like A Song of Ice and Fire, check out WesterosCraft.

@wuddel: Hmm, personally my favorite part of minecraft is survival, but the creative side is just as good. I would play with friends, if you have any that play Minecraft. You don't need to rent a server to play, you can however if you want to play with friends. I would check out the demo and see if you like that. I'm unsure if the demo has creative mode though.

Don't starve is way harder on the player than Minecraft is. You can likely play survival on easy and enjoy it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, I know my fair share :P

There are two ways to build things if you don't want to deal with monsters and such.

There's a "Peaceful" difficulty, where no monsters spawn but you still have to go mine and craft tools and such to get blocks to build things. I think your hunger bar is kept at full so you'll constantly regenerate health.

And there's also "Creative Mode", where your inventory has multiple tabs where you can just pick and select blocks you want to place, you destroy blocks in one hit, cannot be damaged and are able to fly. Pure build mode, basically.

Also no, you don't need to rent a server. Just buy the game (https://minecraft.net/, hit "Get Minecraft!" on the right and go through all that account creation jazz), download it, create a world and hop in.

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki Is easily one of the most helpful sites to look up various things in Minecraft.

For instance, here's the page on Creative Mode.

There is a peaceful mode, but some resources are only available by defeating monsters. There's also an easy mode, where monster spawns aren't particularly common and they're not hard to kill if you're halfway competent at clicking the left mouse button. I usually play on Easy mode and I find it very easy to focus on building there, with the monsters only serving as a distraction. The only things that would really cause problems are Creepers, and you can find easy-to-install mods that prevent them from damaging blocks or regenerates blocks that Creepers damage. If monsters still bug you, you can switch between Peaceful, Easy, Normal, and Hard at any time while building.

For me, Easy is the way to go. The monsters aren't all that bothersome, but you still need to pay them attention. It just adds a layer of the game that I really like without infringing too much on the building part that I come for. Normal and Hard usually force me to pay too much attention to surviving. I would really suggest trying the game with monsters at some point.

If you don't even want to mine for resources, then you can go into creative mode and spawn anything you want without having to work for the resources. This sounds pretty boring to me (no joy of discovering diamond and making a great pickaxe? Or finally getting all diamond armor?) but if you want the "craft" part without the "mining" then an option exists for you.

Also you can play Minecraft locally and by yourself if you want to, no servers needed.

The best thing about Minecraft is that you can make it pretty much any game you want. I play it with the difficulty cranked all the way up, basically making it a survival horror game (some of the new sounds the patched it are really great, especially the spiders). If that's not what you want, you have Peaceful and Easy mode for no and few monsters, respectively.

And considering I was able to run Minecraft and a server at the same time on my laptop, multiplayer shouldn't be much of an issue.

I play adventure mode, but on peaceful because I enjoy the mining, exploration and building aspects of it, while I hate the fighting and food aspects of it.

Once in a while I do need to get resources from monsters, so I turn on normal difficulty which spawns monsters as usual, then when I've got the resources I turn it off.

Personally I play in Survival on Easy instead of Peaceful. I like the fact that anything I build is from resources I've collected myself, instead of taking the easy way and having an infinite supply. Not having infinite supply of everything also forces me to explore in caves or seek out new regions. I set it to easy since I might need resources from enemies for certain crafting recipes.

I've also been playing Don't Starve recently and Minecraft survival is only like that for the first night or two. By that point you'll have a safe place to spend the night. After another day or two you'll have a bed in your safe house so you can skip night all together.

You can turn off monsters (at least when I last played you could), which makes the game funner to me. Creative mode gets reallly old after awhile. What I do is I turn monsters off, go out and mine/harvest a ton of stuff, build a kickass fortress, and then turn monsters back on when Im locked and loaded. One time I built a fortress with a lava moat and enemies would constantly fall into it when they came out at night (animals too!). I also had a gold block throne. Mining to create all of that stuff makes it feel so much more satisfying.