I've noticed some people suggesting categories like gardening% or full completions, and I think those would take way too long for anyone to do without only doing it per split and combining together.

However, I thought, why not suggest a category where the goal is to buy a pet, and maybe get it to do one successful trick? It wouldn't be as long as the others and I could see people coming up with different strategies for it.

The problem with categories like Gardening% or Doodle% is that they don't really fit in with all the other ones because they all involve fighting cogs in some way. These wouldn't be bad ideas if we decided to possibly add category extensions to the game where those who are interested can do these kind of runs, but I'll wait to hear what others think about this first. If there are any more category ideas you guys might have that we could add, leave them down below and we'll think about adding them if people are interested!

Are you saying it doesn't fit in because there's no cog fighting...? I don't get why that's a dealbreaker if so, why have fighting enemies as mandatory in a speedrun?

I'm not saying battling cogs is required for every category. That's part of the reason I was just talking about category "extensions" earlier. My idea was, because we have gotten so many category suggestions over the years, some of which don't involve cog fighting, we could actually add a new page to TTR which contains those types of categories suggested by runners that wouldn't be displayed above the leaderboard or in the miscellaneous section, as there are (arguably) too many categories already, especially in misc.

This is entirely my opinion though, and like I said, I will gladly take up discussion with mods/runners and hear their thoughts on this. I also encourage people to give more ideas on categories if they really do want to see more of them get put in. We don't want the list to be too small.

Ah, I see. Well, I'm against the idea of Gardening%, if it is what I think it is (sounds like getting all the flowers, which considering the time they need to grow would take literal weeks). But, there could be a few categories that could be interesting (pet%, maybe one where you get to a certain amount of laff, map% where you clear all the clouds, etc) that I would feel more inclined to run compared to the task runs that can take hours even for a wr it seems.

How many runners are needed for a category to be a thing?

Technically we don't need someone to do a run first to make it a category. What usually happens is if someone complies to do a run, the category will be added first, and THEN they do the run, because at first we have to make up the rules necessary for the category before people starting running it to make it fair for future runners. Like for example, if we added something like "10 Fish Species", we would make it so you start the time when you click 'Make a Toon' on the home menu, and time ends when the fisherman says "You caught 10 of 70 fish!" and you get the laff boost.