What causes infrastructure failure? Or any other negative state such as famine or outbreak? It occurs to me that forcing an outbreak state would be useful for mat gethering purposes, specifically those pesky pharmaceutical isolators.
I'm assuming its general neglect of a faction. Can these states be avoided by generally supporting a faction (doing missions etc) or is there something more specific that needs to be done?
On the flipside, does supporting a faction always result in a boom eventually or is there something more focussed that can be done which would result in another positive state such as public holiday (i'm assuming that's positive, sounds good to me).
Some of these are better known than others.
Famine: this is the lowest economic state. In theory it can be caused directly by players by attacking a faction's economy - in practice this is almost impossible due to the lack of effective targetable negative economic actions. Instead it is generally caused as a side effect of various negative event states (especially Blight or Natural Disaster) which drain the economy while active.
Outbreak: according to Frontier, this is caused by combat bonds being redeemed (presumably the side that lost the ships). More obviously in Agricultural economies, the missions to bring in biowaste cargo also strongly cause this.
Infrastructure Failure: exact causes of this are unclear, but a faction which is being deliberately attacked will often enter Infrastructure Failure, so murder is likely a component. Infrastructure Failure can also be triggered by other factions in the system being in Infrastructure Failure or Natural Disaster states.
Public Holiday: exact causes are again unclear but to seem in general to be associated with the same sort of positive actions which give Boom and Civil Liberty states. It's certainly possible to have one without the other as the exact patterns of activity differ. Public Holiday state has a passive influence boost associated with it, but does slightly drain economy and security while active.
Pirate Attack: documented by Frontier as caused by trade and smuggling in the system (except weapons trade, which counters it). Very likely also caused by some missions.
Drought, Blight, Terrorist Attack, Natural Disaster: exact causes are unknown. Some pattern of negative activity similar to but perhaps differently balanced to Infrastructure Failure seems most likely. Drought can also occur if another faction in the system is in Natural Disaster state.
With the exception of Famine, all of the above states are what I call "Event" states. They have a long recovery period and a long hidden pending period, and only one Event can be in the state block at any time - this makes it hard to reliably cause a specific one, as when the recovery period for the previous Event ends, depending on what happens in the system there may be multiple Events eligible to happen next, but only one will be picked. This makes it very hard to figure out what specifically causes them, though I expect some groups are looking into it.
In general, Public Holiday and Pirate Attack seem to happen to factions experiencing generally positive activity, and Infrastructure Failure to factions experiencing generally negative activity. The other states are less clear and may require (or be encouraged) by combinations of negative and positive activity. All of them require some level of player activity in the system (yes, even "Natural" Disaster - presumably the justification being that it's not so much the existence of a natural disaster but some other player-induced condition preventing the faction adequately responding to it)
