banished the game after 1k people gets laggy

Yes, even toddlers and newborns are capable of buying household goods by themselves. Babies Make Everything Better: In a gameplay-related sense, as young children are capable of going to the market by themselves and getting food and firewood for their households, meaning their working parents only have to come home when they're hungry or cold and don't have to bother with shopping.

In the late game it's more viable to just buy iron, stone and coal from merchants rather than try to produce it yourself in any significant quantities. Worst part is that they permanently disfigure the landscape and you can't fill in the hole left by quarries after they're depleted.

They have a worryingly high ratio of fatal workplace accidents and eventually run dry, and there's only so much hills you can build mines in. Later on, once you've got a larger population, farming becomes vastly more useful, as they produce far more food for a much smaller space, and farmers with nearby homes, markets, and storage can produce massive harvests. Their labor-intensive nature also means they're less useful when you have a low population relative to a Gatherer's Hut or Hunting Cabin. Gatherer's Huts produce far more food relative to a farm with the very wild and overgrown terrain you deal with in the early game, and farms only produce food once, in Autumn, and only if they're planted in Spring.

Arcadia: a successful settlement can look like this, though please ignore the mines and quarries.

Justified in this case since the merchant knows you want/need it and can get away with charging you more.

Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: If you specifically request an item from a merchant, it'll cost more than it would normally.

Workplace accidents will always kill villagers, never maim them, to avoid the complications of adding another variable to each individual character.

Banished the game after 1k people gets laggy