Creative

Creative mode is one of the two game modes in Minecraft. It is currently only in playable in Classic and from the Beta 1.8 pre-release.

The Creative game mode allows you to build and destroy blocks in a manner in which you can build any sort of structure you would like.

Players are given an infinite amount of most blocks to build with and no health or damage to worry about. Taking advantage of this, players can create large constructions such as castles, roads, water fountains, and much more along with forms of artwork called pixel art. Not only have users designed buildings, pixel art and caves, but also mini-sports. Using the current in-game features, users have put them to clever use. A popular Minecraft sport is 'Spleef'.

Beta Creative
Beta Creative will allow the player to access limited flying and access most of the blocks in Beta. However, once a Singleplayer Creative Mode level is created, it can not be changed to a Survival world (or vice-versa) without an external program. In multiplayer, players can be individually changed between creative and survival mode with the /gamemode <0|1> command available to Operators. 0 being survival, 1 being creative. This means that individual players can play creative mode (at the Operator's discretion) on a survival map, or vice-versa.

In Beta Creative the inventory screen is replaced by the Item Selection Screen, which is similar to Classic Creative's item selection screen, and shows all blocks and items except Fire, Water, Lava, Mob Spawners and Giant Mushroom Blocks. (However, water and lava can be placed by their respective buckets infinitely, the buckets will never empty.)

There is flying pre-enabled, activated by double tapping (default) and using  to go down,  to go up, and the  keys (default) to move. You can disable flying in mid-air by double-tapping again, causing you to drop to the ground.

Mobs will still spawn like in survival (including monster spawners), and will still try to attack the player, but will do no damage. The player can attack mobs from a much greater distance, however since block editing distance remains unchanged, this may be a bug.

Normally indestructible blocks like bedrock and portals can also now be destroyed. Going into the void will still kill the player.

In singleplayer, the player can control the time of day with and. This was removed in the second pre-release, however.

Contrary to popular belief you may switch modes from creative to survival by editing Game mode in the .level file inside the saves folder

Also, presumably as a joke, the only food you can eat in Creative Mode is Golden Apples.

Classic Creative
Classic Creative is available for free. It may be played by going to the Minecraft website and clicking 'Classic'.

For obvious reasons, any blocks added in Beta that were not in Classic at the time can not be accessed: some examples are diamond, wool (the old scale of wool and white wool is available in Classic however), torch, glowstone, redstone, doors, and many more. Also, many of the features of survival mode are not available in creative, such as: crafting, items, smelting, and many more.