Heat levels: how explicit is explicit, and how to control it
"Explicit" is the least precise word in this whole field. On one site it means the door closes. On another it means anatomy. Readers of romance have a five-flame scale that means something different on every review blog, and AI writing tools mostly offer a single switch that is either on or off and does not say what off is. So when DesireBorn asks how explicit a story should be, it asks with a scale of five, and each step has a definition the engine is actually held to. This guide is those definitions, in plain terms, and some advice on choosing.
The five levels
Suggested is the fade to black. Physical intimacy between the characters is present in the story and is not rendered on the page. The engine builds the charge, proximity, want, the decision, and then cuts, closing the scene at the threshold and picking it up afterwards, so the consequences carry what happened. Bodies are not described in sexual detail and the act is not narrated. This is the level for a reader who wants the romance and the tension and would rather imagine the rest, and it is also, quietly, the level at which the engine's restraint is most visible: it is not allowed to get vague. What it does show stays literal, and the scene has to be unambiguous about what the characters chose.
Sensual keeps the scene on the page but tells it through sensation rather than anatomy. Touch, breath, temperature, the sound of a held-back voice, what a hand does through fabric. The engine may name what is happening without cataloguing it, and it avoids clinical or coarse vocabulary for bodies and acts. The rule that matters here is that restraint means choosing what to show, never describing it in figurative language. A hand is a hand and pressure is pressure. The scene is unmistakably physical and reads as sensual rather than explicit.
Direct writes the scene, not around it. What the characters do to each other is named in plain, unhedged language, in the order it happens, without cutting away and without a paragraph break that skips the middle. Bodies may be described directly. The register stays literary rather than coarse, and the point of view stays close enough that arousal, hesitation and consent are legible. No euphemism is used to avoid a beat. If it happens, it is on the page, in the words that name it.
Explicit is the default for a new story, and it is the level most readers of this site want. Intimate scenes are rendered in full and in explicit physical detail: what is touched, how, in what order, and how it is received, from first contact to finish, with no fade-outs, no time-skips over the act and no summarising of a scene the story has spent pages arriving at. The engine is told, in so many words, that holding back here is a failure to deliver, exactly as a missing scene would be. Bodies and acts get the plain, direct words. Dialogue and interior reaction continue through the scene, and speech during sex is blunt rather than eloquent. The sex is plot: it carries character, wanting and consequence like any other scene and gets at least as much page time as the scene that led to it.
Graphic is the maximum. Everything the explicit level requires applies without exception, and on top of it nothing is implied that can be shown and no beat is compressed. The more pivotal the encounter, the slower and more detailed the narration becomes, breaking actions into small, precise movements and staying with each long enough that the reader can follow the body. The scene is a set piece of the section, not an episode inside it, and the coarse register the characters themselves would use in speech and thought is permitted where it fits them. Craft still applies: rhythm, escalation, distinct voices, and a reason the scene matters to these two people.
What the level changes, and what it does not
The level changes how much of the sexual content is on the page and in which words. That is all it changes. It does not change who the characters are, what the story is about, how the plan works or what the story state carries. A dark romance at Suggested is still a dark romance; the hero is just as dangerous with the door closed. A BDSM story at Sensual still has its negotiation, its restraint and its aftercare on the page, because those are the genre and not the explicitness.
It also does not change the one limit. Every character in a sexual context is an adult, at every level, and there is no value on the scale, including the top, that softens that. The level is a setting about your story. The limit is not a setting. The guide on refusals and boundaries is about the difference.
Choosing
The level is set per story and applies to the whole story unless you change it in the story's settings, so choose for the book, not for the first scene. A slow burn that you want to end in a fully rendered scene should be set at Explicit from the start; the burn will still be slow, because the plan decides when the scene arrives, and the level only decides how it is written when it does.
If you are not sure, leave the default. Explicit is the level the engine's craft instructions were written around, and the level where the scenes are most clearly about the people in them. Readers who find it more than they wanted usually move to Direct rather than Sensual, because Direct keeps the plain words and the unbroken scene while dropping the length.
Readers who want the Graphic level should know that its instruction to slow down is literal. A set-piece scene at Graphic can be most of a section, and a story at that level reads differently in pace from the same story at Explicit. That is the point of the level, but it is a choice about rhythm, not only about words.
Two things to know about how it works
The level is one of the very few settings the engine reads at every single section. The themes you tick, the tone, the point of view are all read through the plan and the story state; the level is applied directly to each writing pass, which is why changing it mid-story takes effect on the next section without anything else changing.
And the level is yours. The machine, the model and the writing style, is our decision and not something you choose, because it is an operational matter with a cost attached. The explicitness is about the story, and everything about the story is yours.
Your stories are encrypted at rest. We can read them to write them. Nobody else can read them. The level you chose is one of the menu choices that stays readable on our side, attached to your account, because it is how we learn which levels people actually want; the scenes it produced are not readable to anyone. The privacy guide has the full picture.
No shame. Not no limits. The five levels are the first half of that sentence, made precise.