Support missions (Restore Power) require:
- a faction with a Negative state (see below), and
- that faction owns an Odyssey Settlement that is offline (because of the negative state), and
- the missions only spawn from the faction that owns the settlement, and
- the missions normally will only spawn for settlements within 20 Ly of where you are, and
- the missions only spawn on the concourse mission board, not the ship mission board
Even if a faction is in a negative state all of its settlements will not be offline. And you probably won't get missions to all the offline settlements.
The main reason you will not see missions in the Support section is the faction states. You need an owning faction in a negative state and the negative states are:
With Bodies and Fires:
- CIVIL UNREST
- LOCKDOWN
- NATURAL DISASTER
- PIRATE ATTACK
- TERRORIST ATTACK
Without Bodies or Fires:
- BLIGHT
- BUST
- FAMINE
- INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE
- OUTBREAK
The state governs whether there will be fires and bodies on the ground - they always seems to be the same for the same states. There are some negative states that don't cause settlements to go offline - like Drought. Settlements without fires can be good (faster to complete missions). If you plan on doing Scavenger massacre missions and looting by powering up the bases then you might want Bodies (so you can scan for security codes and save your e-breaches).
You can use the
generic search in inara - note that you can't select multiple states on that search page, but you can manually choose the other ones to check (Civil Unrest and Bust tend to have the most). Look for systems with the most settlements as not all will give missions. As usual the data in Inara can be out of date, but the results do show how old they are. For advanced users you can select a Station Economy if you want a specific type of settlement (Military, Agriculture etc). Avoid factions also in a war, as the war state will override the settlement to be a CZ. Positive states also seem to override negative ones - so for example if a faction is in a Boom and Famine you won't see any missions.
Inara also has a specific search for these locations (
inara) - plug in the system you are in and it should give some systems to look it. I find this less useful as it doesn't indicate how many settlements there are, and sometimes there may be none at all.
Factions can be in multiple states - if a faction has a Negative state
and a positive state (say Terrorist Attack and Boom) then it can still be offline. The system map doesn't always show the negative state, but as long as it is listed on the full list of states for the faction it will count. If there are multiple negative states it appears that either can be chosen as the cause (so you can get mixes between Fires / No Fires in this case).
Also be wary of factions with pending state changes as these also appear to stop missions spawning - so a pending War will stop missions appearing even though the settlement will still be offline.
Finally:
You don't need to take Support missions to Anarchy factions. The scavengers you might come across will not give Notoriety in any system, so no need to stick to Anarchies unless you specifically want Smear Campaigns or Push - and even they these require Anarchy Systems not Anarchy settlements (i.e. the controlling faction must be Anarchy, not the Settlement owning faction).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk
