Low attribute indeed - Perception. But that just sets your base scouting score (the little eye in the bottom left) - if you use the Scout command, you'll raise that value, and you'll be able to recover more from caches, particularly if your score is so low that you're getting that message.
Also, to avoid having to go through character creation again if you're going to create the exact same character, I just added a feature that if you get a game over, and then hit "Continue", you'll start a new game with a different world and the same character template as the one that got a game over (same class, starting stats, starting skills/perks/magic, customization) so you don't have to redo character creation.