Starcraft II - How to drop MULES most efficiently?

Question

I tested out that the MULES of Terran do not "colide" with SCVs. One mineral patch can have 2 SCVs working at the same time. If the distance is long enough the SCVs work perfectly in groups of 3-4 (2 collect and the others travel). With MULES one mineral patch can have 1 MULE and 2 SCVs without interrupting each other. The rule is that 2 MULES can't work at the same time on a mineral patch.

The problem is that if you drop all your MULES always on the same mineral patch, it gets drained way faster than the others and therefore 2-4 SCVs lose their job in that base and become obsolete.

My question is how to minimize that effect considering that a usual base in Starcraft II has 4 mineral patches with double the amount of the other 4. Those with half the amount are further away to compensate. Every other race mines them out evenly if they send exactly 16 workers on those 8 mineral patches.

Answer 1

In this particular scenario, you should be manually dropping one on each closer/higher yield patch.

Worker/MULE AI will have the gatherer go back to the patch they were previously working on so this will help you determine which one they are mining from.

For Example you have mineral patches 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 with patches 2,4,6, and 8 being the patches with more resources and closer. Hotkey, click on 2, Hotkey, click on 4, etc. If you click spam on one of the mineral patches the MULE will simply go to the next closest one that is not occupied by a mule. If you were to just mass click on 2, the next MULE would either go to 1 or 3. The MULE after that would go to 1 or 3 (which ever one the 2nd MULE is not at), the MULE after that, the 4th MULE would go to 4.

It could also be going to 4 first and then 1 and 3 after. It's been a while since I've played Terran to see the exact patterns of movement for the MULEs.