Mineral harvesting

Workers harvest minerals. At the basis of many considerations regarding simple actions, players take into account their mining speed. In this wiki, we mesure mining speed as minerals per second (m/s).

A single worker extracting minerals from a single patch, undisturbed, mines exactly

0.75 m/s on a close patch

0.675 m/s on a middle patch

0.666 m/s on a far parch

Two workers on the same patch mine twice that much.

Three workers on the same patch mine 1.73 m/s, which is the most that can be mined from a single patch.

Depending on how far the patches are, how carefully they are ordered to mine, and depending on how smart the AI is, the income from a single base varies. On average, expect from a single base:


 * 8 workers to mine 5.5 m/s


 * 16 workers to mine 10.5 m/s


 * 20 workers to mine 12.9 m/s

​A single Orbital Command dedicated to casting Mules harvests 3.07 m/s.
 * 100 workers to mine 13.9 m/s

A single vespene geyser can be extracted with three workers at 1.93 gas per second.