The Dojians were the first peregenal race to encounter humans, and humans were woefully ill equipped for the encounter. Early human mining vessels first came upon Dojian drones. It was clear to the humans that the ships were of alien origin, but as drones they were not designed to communicate in any way other than via standard dojian forms of communication. As a result, the human miners were completely unable to open up any lines of communication with the dojian drones, which promptly ignored the presence of the human vessels.

Matters did not improve much once human diplomats and scientists were able to gain the attention of dojian officials. Most human forms of communication are based primarily around audio or visual sensory inputs. Dojians, however, view the universe around them primarily through sensory organs most akin to a sense of smell. This made for very difficult circumstances for communications between the two races, and early attempts at it met with considerable failures and misunderstanding. In hindsight, this challenge alone made conflict between the races almost inevitable.

Conflict did not happen right away, however. The races had only minimal contact in those early days, and remained respectful of each other’s territory early on. As territories grew, however, instances of contact between the races grew as well, which lead to greater levels and occurrences of misunderstanding between the races. Ultimately, that first war between the Dojians and Humans was based almost completely in misunderstanding, and could have been avoided if the races were better equipped, both technologically and intellectually, for communication between them.

Dojian perspective being based in one of smell changes more than just the manner in which they communicate, it means that their basic understanding of the world around them is fundamentally different from that of humans. Take each race’s viewpoint on the concept of time, for example. Humans, whose perspective is based in the perception of light, see time as a series of linear and fleeting moments. When a person takes a step, that foot is there one moment and then moves on to a different place the next, only leaving evidence of its presence behind under specific circumstances.

Dojians, however, view time as a series of small bursts that start a persistence which then slowly fades. They view footsteps as always leaving footprints, almost regardless of conditions. In their view, everything leaves a footprint, and nothing completely disappears, only the future is unknown. And because everything leaves a footprint, very little can be concealed to a dojian. In dojian societies, spouses simply do not cheat, petty theft does not exist, and fugitives almost never get away. Dojian criminals exist, but crimes of passion take on a much higher percentage of crime, not because they are necessarily a more passionate people, but because it is so difficult to get away with crimes in dojian worlds that the effort required to pull off a successful crime is rarely worth the reward.

Furthermore, Dojian people can often have difficult times immersing themselves into human societies. Human’s relatively dull sense of smell leads to a world of highly offensive smells to dojian sensibilities. Early dojian traders actually subsidized their sales of perfumes and other scent based goods to humans for the sole purpose of improving the way humans and human environments smell so that dojians could stand being in their presence. This effectively put the human perfume and soap industries out of business, despite the best efforts of local Earth politicians to delay the inevitable.