The critical distance, r crit , used to identify pairs of reacting species, can be controlled by scaling the van der Waals factor, f VDW . Increasing r crit extends the number of reactive cycles and lowers cost-per-cycle by reducing reliance on the update loop. It also enhances the sampling power of the kinetically corrected Monte Carlo selection scheme by maintaining competition for longer. While conformational information is implicitly encoded in the definition of critical distances, our tool can be extended to include bond angle and dihedral criteria.