You can use a save editor to edit the pollution.sav; 200 is about ~75% which will let octolings spawn. However...Most things seem to be working well, it's just... getting the station infection up is so fucking tiring.
Octolings are currently bugged and applying the wrong pregnancy (eggs instead of infestation)i tried to be defeated by baby octopus but just end up in the nest instead of being a cult
You can actually kind of sneak around this by playing in version 2.1.4, getting infested, saving before it takes over, and loading the save in 2.1.6
But this almost certainly breaks who knows what else. Or, those things are already broken... hard to say with this game half the time.