ATTENTION:  This mod is currently obsolete.  There is a mod called Survival Control Panel which does the same thing as this mod, but in a more controlled manner.  My mod is very simple, it tricks the game into enabling ALL the Survival Mode features baked into the .exe, while Survival Control Panel allows you to control which features you would like via an MCM menu.  I recommend everyone use Survival Control Panel, but I'll leave this up for historical reference or for those who prefer a simpler solution.

This small mod is the culmination of my efforts attempting to figure out how the game implements a particular feature in the Creation Club's Survival Mode DLC.

The feature in question being how you must sleep in order to level-up, and that the level-up menu will automatically open after sleeping.

I wanted to include this functionality in another mod I am working on, but I was unable to find ANYTHING relating to it in the Survival Mode scripts, which stumped me.

I became convinced that they baked this feature into the .exe, which means it's not actually part of Survival Mode, but a hidden feature that is only activated by Survival Mode.

After much trial and error, I have confirmed my hypothesis, and figured out how to trick the game into enabling this functionality.

Thus, I present to you Survival Spoof.

With this mod installed, the Survival Mode checkbox will appear in your game settings menu.

The option will be enabled by default, so you won't be able to level up without sleeping.

The toggle seems to be fully working (if you disable it, you'll be able to level up normally).


TL;DR:
-This mod does NOT contain anything from Survival Mode
-You do NOT need Survival Mode installed
-All it does is trick the game into thinking Survival Mode is installed
-You will NOT have access to any Survival Mode features (other than "sleep to level-up")

Known Issues:
-Lockpicks and Arrows will have a weight of 0.1; this is not an error on my part, but part of the Survival Mode functionality built into Skyrim's .exe file.  Since my plugin only tricks the game into thinking Survival Mode is installed, this functionality is activated along with the sleep to level-up behavior.  Setting the weight to 0 in the plugin file does not work, the game will still set it to 0.1.  It might be possible to create an SKSE plugin which could fix this, but I am not a coder.  Others are welcome to make the attempt.


Technical Details:

I figured out that the game uses the default object manager to look for three global variables which tell it to enable the Survival Mode checkbox, and whether or not the mod is enabled.  Normally, the main script of Survival Mode has a bunch of functions which set these global variables depending on various conditions, but none of it is actually necessary.  I simply made a new plugin, created three global variables, set all of them to a value of 1, and plugged them into the default object manager to correspond to the three survival mode checks.  This tricks the game into enabling the checkbox and turning on any survival mode features baked into the .exe.  Sounds simple, but boy did it take me a lot of headache to figure out.