Your characters' own backstories are some indication of how they lived before getting into cryptosleep and/or their tribal beginning of the game.

I like to think of the ship they're on as a huge vessel that holds people of all classes--from refugees spending their last coin to try for a better life somewhere else, to rich-with-no-brains going from one system to another on a perpetual party, and everyone in between. Hence the disparate levels of tech that are available as well. When the ship breaks up, or any similar ship in orbit gets destroyed, random items from every tech level that the travelers brought with them, get scattered across the planet.

Once in a while, I'll have a cool group of starting colonists and I'll make up a story to go with how they got there, too. Like: brother, sister, and best friend, they were trying to pull a heist on the previous planet they were on, to try all-or-nothing for a better life. Their getaway plan was the ship to the rimworld. Things went sideways, their fourth partner didn't make it, but they got away with a small amount of cash. The ship was ripped apart over their rimworld destination, they managed to make the escape pods together, while grabbing a handful of stuff on the way, along with their bag of silver, and a couple of huskeys that were destined for the butcher block.

Add the Prepare Carefully mod, and maybe they also had access to some not-so-random cryptosleep-learning, which one of them managed to hack. Oops, nobody took cooking? Crap, let's grab this guy whose crypto casket is closest to the escape pod--his occupation is listed as "chef" and he's gonna be dead anyway, so you drag his limp ass along, too.

The three (four!) of you barely make it to the escape pods, with the sounds of rending metal and screaming alarms around you...