Why do mechanoids attack?

[Songleaves]

Did they gain sentience and decide they hate all of humanity? Did their creators die and now they wage an endless war not knowing that the people they were originally programmed to kill are long dead? Are they being controlled by people behind the scenes? Is it a mystery?

Also, why do they tribes attack? I understand why the pirates attack: greed. But I don't know why hostile tribes don't like us. Are they afraid of us? Is it also just greed?

[Albion]

Make up a story you like and stick with it.
The devs don't want to force feed us a specific story so they only drop hints and ambiguous information in the descriptions.
My personal explanation:
The mechanoids were once built by some scientists on a glitterworld and given an advanced AI. They were given the need to expand and reproduce as all living things do. They broke free of their chains and maybe even made that glitterworld their first hive.
Ever since then they are expanding and sending scouting parties to every corner of the galaxy.
What you are fighting are actually just the small vanguard or independent seed colonies/hives.
The mechanoids understand that the galaxy has finite resources and therefore compete with humans for them. The only way to gather as many resources as possible is to make humans gather and use as little as possible and the easiest way to achieve this is by wiping them out.

Tribals on the other hand are just dicks...

No I'm kidding of course. They are very suspicious of your advanced technology and try to get them the easiest way possible: kill all of you and take your stuff.
That is why you can eventually befriend them by releasing their prisoners and make them understand that you don't mean them harm and you're willing to trade.

[Canute]

Or you just don't believe at their tribal god, and all unbeliever need to die.

[Kirby23590]

For the mechanoids.

Well in the rimworlds. because of their age, (250 years and 190 years?) They started malfunctioning , and their AI can't decide what is hostile or neutral thus attacking any living creature, man or animal. they are just targets and enemies. Mechanoids lack the empathy of the humans and animals. Maybe they had empathy modules and they were erased? Who knows? In the lost tribe scenario the mechanoids were mistaken for the tribal's gods, the gods were angry and the mechanoids were their messengers. But in reality the mechanoids were malfunctioning. Being in the rimworld or in space for many years and they see anything that is living and breathing as their enemies... Thus explaining why they would appear in ancient ruins where they guard the people including space soldiers (Convicts and prisoners or Veterans) and refuges (Who are mostly innocent.) and appearing from space ship parts both psychic and poison. maybe they were trapped in space or the psychic ship AI went rouge and started to modify their AIs as well, making them work for the Rogue AI and guard the psychic ship.

For the tribes?

Well i don't know but some jerk made some tribes angry. Either thanks to the pirates or some mistranslation that turned into an insult by some outlanders. Or they saw the falling spaceship ( You the colony. The New arrivals faction. ) as some doomsday bringers or you were monsters sent by the evil gods in the their eyes. So they had an some excuse to attack you.
But if your playing The New Tribe faction. Your former tribe before it was razed by mechanoids. Your old tribe was at war with those tribes or they saw you as a potential threat. So those other tribes attack you. Or they could had sacrificial rituals that the Aztecs had or some strange culture that was made up by the tribes. But releasing their prisoners shows their mistakes and showing that you're a potential friend and a ally shows their ways and errors all wrong. Showing that why you can befriend them, unlike the pirates who are just there to stab people and blow off people heads with guns just for their personal fun and joy...

However the best answer would be using your imagination.

[SpookCrow]

Tribals want to murder you because you crash landed on their land, built on their land, and created advanced technology they don't understand...

Just give them their land back...

[grrizo]

Tribals want to murder you because you crash landed on their land, built on their land, and created advanced technology they don't understand...

Just give them their land back...

Is that the official lore? I always like to think that they're affraid of you because pirates.

[Nameless]

Tribals want to murder you because you crash landed on their land, built on their land, and created advanced technology they don't understand...

Just give them their land back...

Sounds like American History.

[gipothegip]

From the fiction primer

The finish line of human technological development is at the development of archotechnology.
An archotech is a machine superintelligence. A fully-empowered archotech thinks on a level incomprehensible to humans, in the same way a human thinks incomprehensibly to an ant. Once such a machine is built, and empowered to act upon the physical world, it is so powerful as to become the automatic sovereign of its world. It can build new computing facilities underground or in space to enhance its own intelligence, build self-replicating mechanoids to engage in construction or production or war, and design and execute strategies that would be inconceivably intricate and difficult for any organization of humans. Some human groups worship archotechs.
Often, a released archotech will take authority over a planet and begin a process we call transcendence. We believe the world is transformed into some sort of giant computing machine. The biological inhabitants of the planet may be somehow incorporated into the machine, or destroyed, or some combination of the two.
After that, transcendent worlds go silent. From this point on, their motivations are unknowable to us, the same way our motivations are unknowable to an ant.
Each archotech is different, and nearly all are distant and incomprehensible from a human's point of view. They reside in occult computer networks hidden under planets, in space stations, hidden inside a glitterworld's Internet, or instantiated as million-mile superstructures wrapped around stars.
These worlds always break contact with other stellar cultures. They no longer send travelers or signals. Ships entering their space are either turned around silently or never heard from again. In some cases, turned-back ships are changed. Sometimes their crew have been cured of incurable diseases and had their old wounds healed. Sometimes their memories are intact and they recall a flash of light or a mysterious signal before the event. Sometimes they have no memories of the encounter at all. And in some cases, their memories are obviously altered with new knowledge and beliefs, by means we cannot begin to imagine. In one instance, a crew and ship were duplicated. Suffice to say that the word mysterious does not begin to describe the transcendents.
Most transcendent worlds stay in the same state indefinitely - in this they are far more stable than their pre-transcendent neighbors. There are, however, reports of transcendent worlds that have "died" and left systems full of unintelligible wonders, or become mirages of normal planets, or simply reverted back to balls of dust, deconstructing themselves on a molecular level, with the last tiny machine shutting itself off. However, these reports are sourced very distant from the Ordo archive here on Euterpe and are not well-confirmed.


Specific archotech-invented technologies

When a persona helps invent a technology, it can at least explain that technology such that smart people will understand. But archotechs invent their own technology which nobody understands, which they don't try to explain, and which, most likely, no biological human can understand.
We've managed to classify technologies that have appeared repeatedly by their apparent effects, even if we don't understand their mechanism of operation.
Vanometrics: Archotechs often develop some method of interacting with spacetime at a quantum level that allows repeated violation of conservation laws. Somehow, they coax the quantum foam substructure of the universe to break its usual pattern and yield more energy than it consumes. We're not sure if the energy is being taken from another dimension, or pulled from another location, or if the system really is somehow making one plus one equal three. In any case, vanometric power tech seems to generate energy forever with no fuel. Archotechs seem reluctant to scale this power source up past a certain level, however, which indicates that there may be some cost to it that they don't want to pay.
Psychics: Archotechnology seems to be able to interact directly with the mental-informational processes of biological beings, even at a distance. Basic versions of this technology can simply knock someone unconscious, or flood their mind with a single emotion. More complex interactions have been reported but are not well-verified as it is difficult to separate such cases from simple madness. We're also not sure if this means archotechs can read our minds, or whether their psychic power only allows them to send thoughts. The mechanism for this is unknown and nearly impossible to study, since it happens on a cellular level inside living intelligent brains. Monists believe the archotechs are using some sort of long-range quantum manipulation to push atoms around inside the brain to create this effect; dualists believe that the archotechs have learned to manipulate the ethereal substructure of consciousness itself.

Tynan has also stated this

It's not the same ship.

That green material is characteristic of archotechnology (machine superintelligence), not human construction.

Note that the mechanoids often come in green ships, the ones of archotechs. Archotechs are also the only ones to have and understand vanometric and psychic technologies.

Further more, archotechs in the process of transcendance have the ability to control things that are happening on their planet.

Trancendent worlds can also "die"  or regress, leaving behind technology, and according to the primer leave behind worlds that look almost normal (kind of like the ones we play on).

I believe the game takes place on one such planet. Either as a former glitterworld in the process of transcending (whose archotech is still intact), or a transcendent world that regressed in which the archotech is trying to continue its survival / retrancend; hence the ruins & artifacts we encounter, including events on the level of mind control & manipulation happening.

Tribals I'm not sure about. It's probably because you're highly foreign to them, and that may be how they handle outsiders. It could also be that they worship the archotech, and are partly incorporated, seeing you as a threat to it. Kind of like a pathogen to the planet.

It could even be possible that the goal of the game being to get off the planet, is that the archotech doesn't want you there, hence it nudges you towards that goal.


I read one interesting theory that the storyteller, as well as the player, could be subordinate persoae of an archotech that puts everything into action by controlling & manipulating pawns. In which case the pawns are probably mere play things, there to create a story, for our entertainment (actually, the purpose of the game, which is a proof of concept of sorts for Tynan's theory on divergent story telling in video games).

[NiftyAxolotl]

Like a cat that only knows how to scratch, the mechanoids just don't know how to properly express their love.

[{insert_name_here}]

I think that the mechanoids are remnants of a highly advanced civilisation built on the Rimworld.

Over time, the mechanoids' AI grew more and more advanced until they eventually gained sentience and managed to overpower the humans.

Now all that's left are ancient ruins of these settlements, which contain cryptosleep caskets guarded by mechanoids that still remain loyal to their masters and will attack anything that attempts to break in.

Meanwhile, the rogue mechanoids roam the Rimworld, killing all humans they find.

The tribals, upon first meeting the mechanoids, saw them as beings sent by the gods and both worshipped and feared them.

Because of this, the mechanoids have not wiped out the tribespeople but actively try to destroy the other human settlements, with the tribals working with them in attempt to fulfil the desires of the mechanoids that they worship.

[SpookCrow]

I kind of like leaving the mechanoids ambiguous.

I have some fun and hopefully interesting ideas for what they're about, but none of those are really represented in the game yet. You encounter them the same way the outlanders do: as mysterious, terrifying murder machines.

[khun_poo]

It must have something to do with the jade knife 

[JimJammer89]

I've always assumed that there were advanced societies on the rimworlds we play on, and that they were capable of creating mechanoids. Society collapses, giant killer robots remain. Then there's the random ships full of mechanoids from other planets, maybe even trancendent worlds, that occasionally hit the planet (hence the thousands of years of age that some mechanoids have reached).

People have always distrusted foreigners, often hating them. Why should mostly ignorant tribesmen be any different?