Some time ago, I shared the origin story of the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver. Described as the best screen saver of all time, it was nevertheless not without its issues.

A customer complained that they were losing productivity because employees were spending too much time running the 3D Pipes screen saver and waiting for teapots to appear. They requested an option to increase the likelihood of a teapot, so the employees would be placated more quickly and get back to their work.

The teapot was a surprise hidden in the 3D Pipes screen saver. Once in a while, a teapot would appear in the joints of the pipes. This was a tribute to the Utah teapot, a standard reference object in the computer graphics industry.

I can’t find any evidence that this feature request was accepted.

If you set the joint mode to “mixed”, then each joint has a 1/1000 chance of being a teapot. Prior to Windows NT 4.0, any non-teapot “mixed” joint had a 50/50 chance of being a ball or elbow. Starting in Windows NT 4.0, the non-teapot “mixed” joint distribution was changed to 1/3 ball joints and 2/3 elbow joints.

A teapot was also used if you selected “flex” style pipes, and a pipe reached a dead end. Instead of a traditional end pipe cap, the screen saver substituted a teapot.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the rate of teapot appearance does not improve the longer you leave the screen saver running.

Bonus chatter: If you hunt around the Internet, you’ll find many stories of people tracing a performance problem to somebody using 3D Pipes as the screen saver on a server. Servers are not known for having high quality graphics hardware, so the screen saver is forced to run in software mode, which results in high CPU usage. Instead, use the black screen screen saver on your server. It uses no CPU.