Minerals

Minerals are one of two types of resources in the game (the other being Vespene gas). In most games, each player starts with 50 minerals (the exact cost of a worker) and it is usually spent to build a 5th worker (players usually start with 4).

Minerals are the more important of the two because they are used in the beginning of the game. All units cost at least some minerals but not all units cost other gas. Also, in order to extract gas, players must build an Extractor (Zerg), Refinery (Terran), or Assimilator (Protoss) which costs 50, 100, and 100 minerals, respectively. In other words, minerals are used to obtain gas.