From the work distributions, we can see that there is that the protocol work accumulation is very large. Even for 50,000 NCMC switching steps, most of the moves attempted aren't close to being favorable (near 0). To investigate fur-ther into these high protocol work values, we looked at the instantaneous derivative throughout the NCMC switching protocol (Figure ). If there were infinite switching steps, then we would expect to see the instantaneous derivative being roughly inversely symmetric around the middle of the protocol. Instead, what we see is that when the ligand's steric interactions are being turned back on, there is a huge spike of protocol work being accumulated. On the other hand, the electrostatics for the system are well-behaved when both turning off and turning on those interactions. This is illustrated by 12 (c), which looks at the directly at the differences between the protocol work accumulation of the forward and reverse directions of the NCMC move. These pieces of data suggest that the moves we propose introduce the steric interactions too quickly or in a way which causes clashes that are too severe. We therefore could potentially improve MolDarting move acceptance rates by altering our NCMC switching protocol. Specifically, one route we can take to improve the switching protocol is to increase the proportion of steric NCMC switching steps to the electrostatic NCMC switching steps. Another potential way to increase the acceptance rates is to minimize the variance of the protocol work . As seen in Figure , the protocol work variance is not constant and changes over the course of the switching steps, so modification of how we change the sterics and, to a lesser extent, the electrostatics (Figure ) during our NCMC protocol could improve our acceptance rates of these MolDarting moves-and NCMC moves in general.