On our 1.0 minecraft server, the spawn is in the center of a snow biome.
We started to create a nice little village near the spawn, building wooden houses and buildings to match with the snow theme.
However, we'd like to make the village safer, and thus need to put some more lighting on the surroundings.
Currently, if we put torches on the ground or near snow, the snow will melt and leave an empty ground. As we do like the snow theme for our village, how can we arrange the lighting to preserve the snow on a maximum of blocks and prevent mob spawning in the area ?
Is possible, we would like to avoid having glass on the ground, which is not really realistic.
Best Answer
Your best bet is to place torches or glowstone (or even fire or lava) a sufficient distance in the air (using lampposts) that the light level at the ground isn't sufficient to melt the snow, but is sufficient to stop mobs spawning. The answers in this question should help you with this calculation.