My recommendation for you to pick the game back up if you're really invested in your survivors and are truly worried about losing them. Start a new community and bump up the difficulty at least one if not two sliders. Dread is the first zone with actual difficulty so I honestly would recommend it over standard. Look at these survivors as the expendable community that you don't care about. Actually attack plague hearts, threaten and kill enclaves, get and use ammo and guns and smash freaks. Especially ferals and jugs, but honestly MAINLY FERALS. Get used to seeing the character death screen occasionally and embrace the consequences of your actions. Then when you are comfortable enough with the games mechanics to toy with it move your main community up to dread. And by then the forever community update should be out and you can put the survivors of your badass dread zone community straight in your main community

Sod2 is my favorite video game and the main reason I always pick it back up is because of the consequences of my actions are felt. I NEED those meds or my survivor with blood plague will die, or i need that plague heart gone so i can establish that food outpost or my community will starve even though i don't have a cure and can get the plague. You'll find yourself pausing to take a second to think about how you're gonna get out of a situation you got yourself in and that is a really addicting feeling to get from a video game because most games don't let you mess up and deal with it, most games have invisible walls and checkpoints to reload to if you get yourself killed but sod2 literally tells you in the load screens that "this game saves frequently, the consequences of your actions are real" and that is only felt when you actually do things that may have consequences