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While answering this question I discussed the meaning of any% in the speedrunning community, which simply refers to completing the game as quickly as possible while being permitted to ignore side-content. Similarly, there is a 100% speedrun category where the player must complete all content available in the game as quickly as they can.

I thought these two types of speedruns were the only categories in the community, but a user in the comments mentioned low% or 0% speedruns where players avoid any upgrades in the game, if available.

Are there any other common categories for speedruns apart from any%, 100%, or low%?

Wrigglenite
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PausePause
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    this would highly depend on the game, a minecraft speedrun has rsg any%, ssg any%, fsg any%, just for different any% categories, whereas another game might just have any% hard and any% easy. and you might say "but those are all any% i mean other broad categories" and sure, however different sub categories can have barely no difference or a massive change depending on the game. theres also the difference between glitched and non glitched, different goals in games, like beating a specific boss and so many other factors – Topcode Feb 26 '21 at 18:33

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It varies wildly by game. Each game's speedrunning community will come up with categories that make the most sense for their game and the available glitches.

In general though, the most common categories are going to be any%, 100%, low%, and glitchless, but even these are not always present: for example, Super Mario 64 breaks from this and uses 0 star, 1 star, 16 star, 70 star, and 120 star as its primary categories.

It's also common to use category names that name a particular glitch, such as no wrong warp, no out of bounds, or no arbitrary code execution. And sometimes, you might also see a category called "no major glitches" which means that a handful of particular glitches defined in the rules are banned, but anything else is allowed. Obviously though, these will depend on the game.

For some other games, this framework doesn't work at all like with Old School Runescape, which instead lists very specific goals like "free-to-play ironman champion's guild" as speedrun categories.

Unionhawk
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  • I agree that these are the main categories you see, with others either being memes or subsets of these. For example, Mario Galaxy's 120-star is 100% single playthrough while 242-star would be a complete 100%, or Portal's no-SLA basically being a partially-glitchless – Batophobia Feb 26 '21 at 18:46
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    For those curious about the seemingly arbitrary number of stars in Mario 64: 120 star is equivalent to a 100% run. 70 stars is the minimum needed for a glitchless run. 16 star used to be a low % run, before someone pulled off a 1 star run, which became the new standard for a low % run until someone finally pulled off a 0% run. – Nolonar Feb 27 '21 at 22:42