Minerals

Minerals are one of two types of resources in the game, the other being vespene gas.

Overview
According to Doran Routhe, a famous United Powers League scientist, planetary systems beyond Sol could contain new resources that could benefit a resource-depleted Earth. Although the terran colonists went beyond their intended destination, Routhe's theories were proven correct, the Koprulu Sector featuring clusters of crystal-minerals, often found in clusters and sometimes as veins of ore in mountains.

Terrans and protoss smelt these minerals down to create the armored hulls of starships, vehicles and personal armor. Even the zerg require minerals to harden their carapaces and develop strong teeth.

Extraction of minerals take time to gather and specilized equipment/abilities found on SCVs, probes and drones is required to extract them. However, terrans have also developed automated mineral extraction processes when found as ore veins in mountains.

StarCraft I
In most melee games, each player starts with 50 minerals, which is the cost of a worker. Usually, the starting stock is spent in training a new worker.

Minerals are the more important of the two physical resources, for all units produced from buildings require at least some minerals to be produced, while basic units and vultures do not require vespene gas. In addition, gas harvesting is possible only by building a gas-extracting structure on a geyser (extractor for zerg, refinery for terrans and assimilator for protoss), which costs 100 minerals for all three races (for zerg, 50 for a drone and then another 50 to mutate it into an extractor to make 100), and sending workers that consume minerals to harvest gas.

StarCraft II
In StarCraft II, workers collect 5 minerals per trip. This is due to the improved unit pathing and the decrease in time required for a worker to gather a chunk of minerals. This results in a total pickup rate that is very similar to what it was in StarCraft I.

The typical mineral field contains 1500 minerals.

Mineral fields use the Adjutant portrait.

High Yield Minerals
In StarCraft II, a new variety of minerals, yellow-colored, named high yield mineral fields, has been introduced. These minerals are worth more per trip than normal mineral fields are. They provided 8 minerals per trip at WWI 2008. They use the Adjutant portrait like the "normal-yield" minerals.