For the MFCC-MBE(2) contribution to the protein-ligand interaction energies, we tested the use of a distance cutoff to reduce the number of trimer calculations that are necessary and thus to reduce the computational effort. To this end, we chose a cutoff λ and include only those fragment-fragment-ligand trimers for which the distances between the ligand and both fragments or for which the distance between the ligand and one fragment as well as the distance between the two fragments are below λ (i.e., at least two of the three intermolecular distances within the trimer are below λ). Here, we define the distance between two molecules as the shortest distance between any of the two fragments' atoms.