Fix: AtlasOS Playbook Stuck at “Reticulating Splines”
During the implementation of the AtlasOS Playbook, the setup can get stuck on the Reticulating Splines screen. In this stage, the setup often goes through various dependencies and other utilities to download using the curl utility. However, an inconsistency can cause this issue to become stuck, in which case you will have to reinitiate the current process.
AtlasOS offers a minimal and optimized Windows experience, especially designed with gamers in mind. As such, it provides higher framerates and better performance by debloating a generic Windows installation. The operating system uses playbooks to deploy the required configurations on your computer, helping you achieve better gaming results. You can use the following methods to mitigate the issue when this configuration is stuck.
1. Allow the setup to run for an hour.
The first thing you should do when starting to troubleshoot the issue is not to touch the setup at all. In some cases, the setup process is not stuck but rather proceeding very slowly, which can lead you to believe otherwise. Therefore, we recommend allowing the setup to run for at least an hour without making any changes to see if the issue persists.
In case the progress bar does not seem to advance further, move the toolbox and playbook files to the Desktop location on your computer and try again. Doing so should resolve the issue in most cases, and the setup will proceed, albeit slowly.
2. Skip the installation of VCRedists.
The reason the Playbook gets stuck at the Reticulating Splines screen is currently due to a bug. The issue occurs when certain Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables are missing on your computer, and the Playbook setup attempts to download and install them.
For this purpose, the curl utility is used in the backend. In such a scenario, you can skip the installation of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables to resolve the issue. Doing so will resume the Playbook progress, and you can deal with the Redistributables on your own afterwards.
Follow the instructions below to skip the VCRedists installation:
- First, open the Task Manager. You can do this by right-clicking the Windows icon and selecting Task Manager from the menu that appears.
Opening Task Manager - In the Task Manager window, look for the curl executable, PowerShell, and Windows Command Processor processes.
Windows Powershell Process - Select these processes one by one and end them.
- After you do that, the progress should resume and the issue will be gone.
3. Manually install VCRedists, and then apply the playbook.
Another way you can mitigate the problem in question is by manually installing Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables beforehand. These are essentially runtime libraries required by various applications on your computer, built using Microsoft C and C++ tools.
Playbook attempts to install these runtime libraries automatically during the setup using the curl utility. As such, if you install the libraries before initiating Playbook, the problem will cease to exist.
Installing VCRedist is a straightforward process. Simply head to the official website for VCRedists by Microsoft here. Download the setup files for any missing VCRedists on your computer and run them. The Atlas team has not listed the required VCRedists versions; as such, we recommend installing all the versions starting from 2015.
If you are not sure about the current VCRedists versions on your computer, open a Control Panel window and navigate to the ‘Uninstall a Program‘ section.
