More specialised merchants and Random Trade Events are made available once you. In my honest opinion, dont play this with the intention of having a smooth ride, if you want to play it long term with lots of hearthlings and combat and custom buildings, if your playing casual, low numbers, simple buildings, etc. Players can trade with travelling merchants using gold coins as a currency. I think that the controls for building and especially custom building are not incredibly intuitive, but thats my opinion, and Ive still owned and played the game a few times over the course of a few years. Go to the Mods menu from the main menu, find the 'Microworld for Tests' and 'Stonehearth Unit Tests' mods in the Local mods column, and enable both of them.
#Stonehearth multiplayer controls mod
The stonehearthtests mod now comes bundled with the game. yes you can play with fewer hearthlings and you can even play on peaceful mode so theres no enemies, but as long as thats what you wanted out of the game thats fine. Also, multiplayer doesn't work unless you do the things listed in a. No they generally havent fixed the most prevalent ones, imo.
I would say in short, that It can be fun, i think with the bugs and performance issues at the stage its at and for the cost, you may want to make sure that you can even play it on your own before tackling it with multiple people, alot of the bugs which you've obviously read about.