I'm in a strange place right now

[malawiglenn]

As it’s a single player game mainly, you can also do a ‘semi-hardcore’ in a way you choose:

Create a backup folder of your characters (disable Steam cloud saves if on Steam) . Back up your characters once every session/day/week/month or whatever. Then when you die, you still lose a fair bit of progress (depending on last backup) but you’re not back to square one.

If you feel like this is cheating, it’s a single player, non-competitive game, so figure out what works best for you to enjoy playing

Or play softcore and allow 3 deaths and delete char after 3rd death.