Different treatments of the interstellar radiation field, as shown through the correlation between the clouds’ H₂ mass vs. CO(1–0) luminosity: the left-hand panel shows a non-localized implementation (i.e., same ISRF for all clouds in a galaxy) whereas the right-hand panel shows the localized treatment (considering the 64 nearest-neighboring clouds). SLICK’s clouds are indicated by the hexagonal bins, where the colormap indicates the strength of the radiation field impinging on the clouds. The localized ISRF approach better matches observed z = 0 extragalactic GMCs (red filled circles; Bolatto et al. 2008; Pineda et al. 2009; Meyer et al. 2011; Wong et al. 2011; Rebolledo et al. 2012; Meyer et al. 2013).