It seems that in endless you can store items in your backpack then start a new endless and those items will be remain across runs, effectively letting you precook food and use in a future run. Does this fall under the Persistent Items restriction, or is that only for the apartment items?

Yes, essentially that would be the same. All items used in Any% runs require you to show a new game selection at the start of the run for this reason. Good question.

How does that work with upgrades for Endless? Because the top run for Farm Endless has Grill Upgrade 1, and I don't think the Diner even has an upgrade screen to verify.

So either all Endless runs should have to show a new game being started first or just allow upgrades and backpack items for faster times and more interesting routing (like taking big coffees in and some precooked patties). Or maybe have a separate category for that but there aren't enough runners to really justify it.

I thought you were referring to the tricks used in Any% with Endless mode not the actual Endless% category.

Neither of those runs are considered peak, like you mentioned the category doesn’t have enough runners to justify specified rules in terms of banning specific tech or tricks.

I see no issue with using backpack/pre-made items. The category wasn’t created to be super competitive in the first place so by all means go all out.

i figured we make a new game to start with $0 and we dont have the backpack in the endless runs because of starting a new game. having the backpack on its own would be a bigger timesave than storing stuff in it before hand since customers dont show up instantly and it stops burgers rotting, id probs just put coffee in it to start quicker if we're allowing that now cos otherwise itd be a pain to set up for every run.

i didnt know a run had a grill upgrade thats dodgy :/ setting up all the tokens as well would be even more painful