Back in my day you didn't have this namby-pamby charcoal business! No sir, if we wanted torches we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow* uphill both ways to find some coal! Sometimes you'd go for days without finding any, and you'd have to spend your nights in a tiny, sealed-off cave, with maybe a furnace for light! But we liked it that way! You learned to appreciate torches and all their wonderful monster-preventing properties!
*because before biomes there was a 50% chance that a newly generated world would be all snow