Natives

[mortimus]

So, in the Rimworld universe, there's no faster than light travel... so how come raiders turn up to attack me on day 2? this makes no sense to me. Surely it would take some time for nearby ships to pick up any distress call and move to help/take advantage? Rimworld is also supposed to have a "wild west" feel - so if we are the cowboys, where are our injuns?

A possible solution to these is for the planet we land on to have primitive 'natives'. These could possibly be aliens, or maybe human survivors of a previous crash or colonization attempt that have subsequently regressed to a bow and arrow level of technology. The benefits of this, as I see it are:

• A different, easier threat than raiders, to ease the player in, provide variation, and escalating difficulty
• Competition for food and/or metal
• Potential trade partners for seeds, simple tools/weapons, scavenged tech etc.
• A source of storyteller events - escaped prisoners, natives declare war, tribal disagreements, sources of plagues, hunts, festivals, and anything else Tynan or us can think of
• A source of some new (simple) colonists early on
• Something easy to phase out - when you get too powerful, they all attack at once (and destroy you or are destroyed) / decide your not worth the trouble / die from an off world virus (brought by your colonists or raiders) etc.

I've seen natives vaguely suggested or alluded to in a few other posts, but no real fleshing out of the idea. What do people think?

[FlyingTurtles]

The raiders are other people from the ship you were on that crashed, but they just landed in a different location.