I actually can't get a single black market.

[Alan Phipps]

Fresh vanilla start with ToA on 8 May and I have unlocked 3 bars so far via signal leak missions although accepting them was never a priority for me. So they do appear, even if perhaps rather infrequently.

[alexdefelice]

Thanks! I've been at it for an hour, going to spend another hour or two. Probably too early to say if bug or just very bad luck, but this is getting old fast!

[Katorone]

Now that it's mentioned... I don't remember seeing any signal leak quests by anyone other than "Civilian". The BUC station offers some normal quests, but I'm not sure that's what is being noticed.

[alexdefelice]

I've been looking for 2 hours straight, mostly in TEL and ARG space, bringing my total search time to 6-7 hours. I'm finding tons and tons of signal leaks, but they're all rides, discounts, hacking, kill missions, sabotage, boarding, everything but black market missions. This is a new game in ToA 5.1. No mods, totally "unmodified" save. Is it possible that a plot mission status or something is preventing these from spawning? I'm slowly losing my mind.

[Alan Phipps]

I'm pretty sure I got my three station bars accessed for missions delivering illegal inventory items such as unstable crystals, hacking device components, etc. I think they came with a mission timer too. Once you have the PHQ and transportation to/from the inventory safe these become rather tame which is why they are not a priority for me.

EDIT: Thinking about it, I'm not sure those mission were in fact from signal leaks but may just have just been from the mission icons that may pop up on stations and in the map (if not obscured by the station icon) when you get close enough. They also then appear listed in 'Mission Offers', so perhaps no signal leaks were involved.

EDIT 2: Just had a shady mission in 5.10 vanilla to deliver 5 x AGI Cores with a 30 min timer to unlock the Bar and other rewards from a signal leak on a PIO station, so they are around.

[rboerdijk]

I've been looking for 2 hours straight, mostly in TEL and ARG space, bringing my total search time to 6-7 hours. I'm finding tons and tons of signal leaks, but they're all rides, discounts, hacking, kill missions, sabotage, boarding, everything but black market missions. This is a new game in ToA 5.1. No mods, totally "unmodified" save. Is it possible that a plot mission status or something is preventing these from spawning? I'm slowly losing my mind.

Shady guys ( black marketeers) will only spawn on stations not producing majadust, spacefuel or spaceweed. When starting "stranded", for me there were 348 shady guys total.
Glancing over the script which spawns the shady missions, it looks like if there is a shady guy in the station, then one leak is guaranteed to be for the shady guy mission. Note there are usually multiple leaks, so it's not guaranteed to be the first on a station which you scan.

Any chance you could send me your savegame (e.g. via dropbox, or similar), then I'll take a quick look (at least I can tell you which stations to try).

Tried the stranded gamestart, cheated a bit to know which stations have shady guys (Bright Promise, of the 9 stations I looked at 6 had shady guys - which is more than I expected, and there are around 20 stations there), started scanning leaks (first one is Boso), 2nd one was the shady mission. Next station. also found a shady guy. For my feeling, it might take a while to fine one, but not a single one in dozens of hours seems weirdly off. Note: There is one part during the hatikvah storyline where you won't get such signal-leaks specifically on "scale plate" stations, but it should still work as expected for other stations during that time.

[oddible]

Have you tried some kill mission? I had the same problem. It only took one kill mission and the black market missions unlocked.

Correlation does not imply causation. This was chance.