Sometimes the best seat in the house is the one nobody knows you're in. Spectator mode lets you watch a scene play out between NPCs — and quietly direct it — without your character being present at all.
Hover over any building on the settlement map and click Spectate in the tooltip (next to Enter). You'll drop into a cinematic scene inside that building — but your character stays exactly where they are on the map. The NPCs can't see or hear you, don't learn your name, and won't remember you were there. If someone was hoping to run into you, they still are.
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Instead of speaking as your character, you type stage direction. The input asks "What happens next?" — describe an event, a mood shift, an arrival, a discovery, and the characters react to it in their own voices. Everyone present in the room takes part from the first exchange, each with their own personality, memories, and opinions of one another.
A Spectating banner at the top of the scene reminds you which mode you're in. There's no combat while spectating — you're a ghost, not a referee.
Some ideas that work well as direction:
Spectated scenes are real. Every NPC present writes honest memories of what happened, and their opinions of each other shift based on how the scene went — an argument you engineered between two rivals stays argued. What they don't do is form memories about you: as far as the world is concerned, you were never there.
You can find these moments afterwards:
Spectating is a worldbuilding tool as much as a gameplay one. Use it to develop relationships between NPCs before your character gets involved, to seed rumors and tensions you'll "discover" later in play, or simply to check in on what the rest of your cast is like when you're not around.