Oh yeah you can do that. You won't be able to play online though, unless someone sets up a server with user id checking off.
I've been playing this a lot lately. My gigantic penis fortress is nearly complete. It does have a learning curve. The first night is kind of rough. But it gets easier after that. I find it helps to have a window with the recipe book open so I don't have to remember how to craft items.
There's a mod that let's you search for items/objects and view their recipes, also allows you to click on each ingredient to see what the recipe for that is. (in the case of complicated machines) I forget what it's called though.
Do you still play? I know you were heavily into Minecraft for awhile. I guess I'm getting into it kind of late. I'm having a lot of fun. Kind of reminds me of Legos when I was a kid, minus all of the cleanup.
I had a lot of fun with it. I built one big castle with an enormous underground lair and a monster trap that mostly worked. Then I decided to build glass catwalks across the island so I could walk around at night. After that I got bored with it but I was thinking I'd try it again someday.
I play the Xbox version and there's no need to learn recipes as the crafting system has been seriously streamlined (read dumbed down). I greatly enjoy the game and my ohnly gripe with it is that the worlds aren't all that big, especially when compared to the nearly infinite(?) size of the PC worlds. I usually get bored after a while what with having to make your own goals. I'll finish a nice castle then think, "Now what?" and get bored. Also there's a bug on the Xbox version that can occasionally cause worlds like this to spawn:
I only play online these days, it's nice to be sociable, even if your neighbours are 1000 blocks away
Most decent servers have moderators and plugins to prevent that. The one I'm on has residency protection and tools to roll back damage as well as find out who caused it. We also had a jail which we could send trouble makers. They'd have to wait it out in online time, no logging out and leaving. There was also an inactivity monitor which kicked you out if you were inactive, so you couldn't leave it unattended. Also new people can't affect the world until they've been approved. Very few servers are actually unprotected these days. Most grieving vids are from servers with dumb, gullible moderators.