Coal seems to be more rare than it should, forcing players to consume a lot more charcoal then you would on a vanilla game. It's rather annoying.

But also think about performance, If a player opts to enable mob spawning, and their lighting is not efficient, there's more mobs overall, easy coal or torches equals less wild hostile mobs.

My first thought was the /gen feature could be more generous, so that it's also more attractive to actually "work" on getting cobblestone. I see a lot of players just wait it out for the free coal they get from votes, or the tiered kits, or buying from players who have a surplus.

A 2nd source could be from the voter crate. That can be in the form of coal or actual torches, that is if you want to keep the overall worth of coal for smelting about the same. The crate itself has a lot of repeated items, maybe one of those "100 credits", or cobblestone packs could be torches or coal.

And 3rd, the server shop could have a stack of torches for cheap. This keeps the value of coal itself, about the same.

 

Coal can be obtained either as a small chance of it spawning in your cobble generator or purchasing it from other players. I don’t know what the coal rate is on the economy server, but it’s definitely not expensive either.

If there’s no way for you to get coal, you can use charcoal as an alternative by smelting logs in a furnace.

 

Absolutely everything is easy to get on Eco. You use profit shops to make money, then just buy what you want from /shop.

 

I don't think that coal is hard to obtain on economy considering that you can buy it rather cheap. You can also craft torches with charcoal.