Look, let's be honest: the sudden and rather massive balance overhaul that caught everyone's eye on the StarCraft 2 public test server has finally made its way into the live build.

Blizzard Entertainment confirmed on the 23rd that patch 5.0.16 is now live. It is a change we have been anticipating since the announcement back in May, specifically the radical reduction of starting workers from 12 to 8. To put that into perspective, they are essentially rolling back the 2015 Legacy of the Void change that bumped the count from 6 to 12—some 11 years later, we are back to square one.

This update carries over all the bits we saw vetted on the test server. With the worker count dropping to 8, you can expect the early game build timings and the tempo of engagements to shift quite drastically.

To keep the economy from spiralling out of control, they have tweaked the resource counts as well. Standard large mineral fields have been trimmed from 1,800 to 1,600, while the smaller ones have been bumped from 900 to 1,100. Additionally, standard gas geysers now provide 2,500 resources instead of 2,250, and the harvest rate for rich gas geysers has been adjusted from 8 to 6.

Beyond the economy, there are race-specific balance tweaks for Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, along with a host of ancient bugs finally being squashed. They have even thrown in a few quality-of-life features that were previously missing. Best of luck out there.