the only gamerule that prevents ice from melting is randomtickspeed, but it would affect other things and could be an issue (ex. crops, trees)

 

well, having a randomtickspeed of 0 would freeze everything... so maybe having crops not able to grow and fire lasting forever is a good thing for building, so that blocks can’t be changed randomly because of the biome

 

Nope, not at all. Gamerules affect the whole world, so we'd essentially make farm towns useless.

It is.

There is a /rg flag called ice-melt - adding it to the list of town flag application flags would fix this issue (and while we're at it, maybe add ice-form as well...).

 

my bad

 

the latter would be useful for towns in snowy biomes...

 

+1 Bump