Could games without a visible ending be speedrun? If the game lasts forever is that allowed and the speedrun goal is set to something specific in the game?

Usually games like that are not allowed as the game request process likes to see a run that completes the game to its full completion. I think exceptions have been made for that with runs of games that are open ended but you usually have to do a pretty good job of “selling” to staff why the game is worthy of an LB and isn’t just a ton of arbitrary cutoff point categories.

Garsh well I play multiple open ended games, the one I'm thinking the most about is Kenshi. The game lasts forever, and there is no ending besides death (as they are permanent in that game), but there are several things you could speedrun to e.g. killing a certain boss, getting a certain item, or getting a certain cash or stat value. I guess as the technical way to end the game, you could speedrun dying in that game.

In a situation like that, I would recommend doing a run to kill the final "boss" of the game. If there is no final boss and bosses keep respawning or being generated, then I would imagine it would be a little harder to have the game accepted.

The issue with games like that is that goal based categories are infinite, and tend to lead to bloated LBs with almost exclusively arbitrary categories. You could end up creating categories for an infinite amount of situations like getting an item, beating a boss, or getting a score based value. On the surface categories like that seem fine, but one issue is that people tend to request these types of games so they can essentially get an unrestricted amount of "WRs" by just creating nonstop categories for every little thing - after all, if you have a category for achieving a stat value of 100, why not create 10 more for every 10 point value increment of 100 to 200?

That's really the main issue with games like that. Sure, other games can have arbitrary categories, but they are usually restricted to being with a defined game, so there isn't as much bloat with the categories created. Like I said, you can definitely try to request it by completing as far into the game as reasonable and explain in the Description field why you think it belongs on the site. It might feel weird having to sell the game in such a way, but in the past I've seen issues with games like this and I've seen a few rejected for not having a solid ending point to them. Of course I'm not staff so I might be remembering something that isn't true anymore, so there isn't any harm in submitting the request and seeing what happens.

Well I guess I'll see if I can create viable speedrun categories for Kenshi without just flooding it. I'm thinking kill a main faction leader would be the simplest category (in the game there are tons of factions with leaders, but there are about 5 main leaders of the factions that control the world), so I think that may be interesting if the category is just find and kill one of them.

Hey, I'm a mod for a few Paradox Grand Strategy games, most of whom are open-ended sandbox games without any one definitive goal. The way we've done it for these games is to make a lot of different categories for limited goals within the games, but try our best to restrict categories to ones that aren't too arbitrary. For example, most of these games have steam achievements that are defined and implemented by the developers, and many categories are based on those. Other categories are based on challenges that are typical within each game's general community and clearly laid-out within the game, such as forming historical countries (since these are historical strategy games).

There definitely is the risk of category-bloat though, since even within these restrictions there are loads of potential categories that could be considered (some of these games have over 300 steam achievements for example). But I think that's somewhat inevitable, since the alternative would be to arbitrarily restrict the number of categories even though each one could be considered equally valid. In my opinion, the best you can do is find some clear guidelines for what could be considered a reasonable category, and then try to organize the leaderboard as neatly as possible to accommodate it (for example by using the Individual Level feature).