One day on the Rimworld is equivalent to several days in real life.
Each year in Rimworld is 60 days, but your colonists' natural age span is not too different from real life (even if the constant violence may make it seem short). Therefore, the planet that got terraformed must rotate much slower than Earth, but still takes roughly the same time to loop around its Sun. This could also explain why the crops grow so quickly - apart from them being GMO that is designed to grow quickly, it also might be that they would have taken a few earth-weeks to grow, they just seem even faster due to the Rimworld having such long days. The player is some kind of archotech.
Your able to take a group of tribal outcasts from caveman to ship building within a couple years. Research which should take A lifetime is complete within days. Even if your a tribal start you still get a friendly AI from your past sending you the location of a ship. It makes a lot of sense when you think about the set events you find. The storytellers are Archotechs in control of the rimworld.
Unknowable goals (drama!), nigh infinite power, and tendency to mess with people? Sounds about right. The three storytellers are remnant AI from a theatre program of the civilization that once inhabited the rimworld and now choose certain colonies to be their actors in real life plays. The friendly AI who just so happens to know where you are? They probably called them to up the stakes with a genuine shot at escape. The Archotechs are intentionally withholding the secret to FTL travel.
It seems unlikely that ancient, god-like artificial intelligences would be unable to crack the code to superluminal travel, especially since it's theoretically possible in real life thanks to the Alcubierre Drive concept. So it would make sense for the Archotechs to withhold the secrets of FTL travel, either to limit the political reach of interstellar empires, protect mankind from some eldritch threat or as part of some gambit that's incomprehensible to human minds. The colonists each have a multi-tool strapped to their wrists
Each colonist has a Archotech designed multi-tool strapped to their wrist as birth. Its sufficiently-advanced science, and allows colonists to cut and mine stone with their bare hands, generate seeds ex niliho, contains a database of tech that a colony would need and weld and shape metal as needed, just to name a few things. Rimworld takes place in the Orion's Arm universe.
Archotechs, Achailects, how much of a difference is there really?