For the larger concentration of germanium, the sampling was limited to a few tens of expert-chosen distributions, which in addition strongly favoured a significant population of the D4R T-sites to start with (ITH 12 , BEC ) or explicitly focused on the population of the D4Rs only (SOV , SOR 11 , AST ). Even the older works using empirical force fields considered only a few hundred randomly generated structures for BEC and a range of other frameworks (AST, ASV, BEA, LTA, ISV) . By contrast, in this work, we extensively probed the germanium distribution space across a broad range of germanium concentrations. In addition, our simulations generated equilibrium distributions of structures at 300 K, thereby capturing thermal effects, rather than a collection of athermal local local minima, as in previous works. We also quantify the preference of germanium for D4R units as a function of zeolite topology, and show that it is strong for low to intermediate germanium loading (approx. Si/Ge ≥ 5) but significantly weakens for high germanium loading, where other than D4R T-sites become strongly populated. Also, we show that even for low to intermediate germanium loading the germanium population in other than D4R T-sites is on average non-negligible (up to 50 % of the Ge atoms are in non-D4R sites), despite the fact that most stable structures (the global structure optima), typically considered as the most representative structures in the literature, do contain a disproportionately high amount of germanium in the D4R units (Figure ). The distributions containing Ge atoms spilled-over to the non-D4R sites are both relatively stable and there are many of them, i.e., they have a high "density of states", which makes them important for the total distribution at a finite temperature, i.e., we observe the increased role of the configuration entropy.