Well, it’s official. The Battle Classes are locked in Skylanders Imaginators.
However, if you have a few extra items on hand, there is a very simple way to #ResetTheBattleClass.
The #ResetTheBattleClass Process
What You Need
As I mentioned above there are a few extra items you need. These include:
- Nintendo 3DS System
- Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure (for 3DS)
- Portal of Power (for 3DS)
You can use any 3DS or 2DS system. Similarly you can use any Portal of Power that is made for the 3DS.
The magic of this trick is actually in the coding of the Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure game.
UPDATE: This actually works on more games and systems than originally thought. I will be testing more soon, but here’s what we’ve found so far…
- Nintendo 3DS with Spyro’s Adventure – Personally tested.
- Nintendo 3DS with Giants – Personally tested.
- Nintendo Wii with Giants – See Video
How It Works
Load up Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure. In the main hub visit Wendel (this is the guy you interact with to scan your Skylanders into the game).
Set up everything as you would if you wanted to scan in a new Skylander, but then put your Creation Crystal on the 3DS Portal.
You should get an error message that looks like this:
Hit the Reset button.
Now you should see a screen that looks like this:
That’s it. You’ve reset your Creation Crystal.
You can now put the Crystal back on the Portal for Skylanders Imaginators and you should be prompted to select a Battle Class again.
My Thoughts
While this is a handy workaround for those of us that have a necessary items around the house already, I would not suggest buying a 3DS just for this purpose.
If you really have an extra $200 to spend on a 3DS, I would just as soon go out and buy another 20 Creation Crystals.
Watch the preview videos. Watch some gameplay videos. Figure out which Battle Classes you like and which elements they will go well with.
It’s definitely annoying, but the locked Battle Classes aren’t the end of the world. There is so much they did right with Skylanders Imaginators. The entire game can be played without touching the Creation Crystals.
I highly recommend that you take the time to enjoy Skylanders Imaginators regardless of your thoughts on the Creation Crystals.
Makes me wonder if you could do that on the Wii version of Spyro’s Adventure. Or just using the 3DS Amiibo Sensor. Right now this and how Activision basically milked an extra 20-30 bucks from us is what bothers me.
I was thinking how inevitable it will be that someone will make a basic computer program to reset them. Simply plug your portal into your computer USB. Maybe.
I agree about it not being a big deal though. Getting one of each crystal and will let you make one of each class. Just keep track! Also if some jerk bought a bunch of crystals and locked them as one class, just go back to the store and exchange it.
The SkylanderEditor for windows PCs will do it, with the Spyro Adventure USB drivers.
There’s also a linux version of the editor, and a linux program that simply corrupts the crystal to reset it, but i haven’t been able to get the portal to work with linux.
Buy 20 creation crystals INSTEAD OF a 3DS? That’s just stupid. The 3DS would be a much much much much better investment; it’s a wonderful system.
If you’re actually going to play the 3DS sure, but if you’re going to buy it just for this hack it doesn’t make much sense.
plus what if activison catches this reset glitch in the crystals programing and the next batch of creation crystals wind up being glitch proof?
I’m not a programmer, but from what I understand they would have to patch the old Spyro’s Adventure game. Even if they did, the updates on the 3DS are not automatic. So as long as you don’t update the game it should continue to work.
I don’t think there’s anything they could do directly to the Crystals to prevent this, it’s the old software that’s allowing this to work.
Now what will happen is Activision will get wind of this and patch it 😛
I’m not a programmer, but from what I understand they would have to patch the old Spyro’s Adventure game. Even if they did, the updates on the 3DS are not automatic. So as long as you don’t update the game it should continue to work.
What I mean is that they will probably change the programming in the creation crystals that they send out. I am a programmer and you are right, they would need to patch Spyros Adventure to fix this… or change the software inside the crystals.
Or force an update for the version on the consoles. Want to sign in with Xbox Live or PSN, this is the latest version and you must use it! The question there is can they detect a character reset using this trick from a fresh crystal.
As for hardware mods on newer crystals the question there is whether it is cost effective for them to make very costly and someone tricky hardware mods on subsequent versions of the crystals. The actual crystal would have to keep a count of the number of times the battle class has been set and allow or deny write. And the attribute it keeps to decide if that class has been set must not be reset by the workarounds presented here.
Bear in mind this has to be tested on all code bases for all consoles and it has to both work to block this workaround and not mess up anything else that might have a wider effect.
It’s a lot of time and money to spend to try to take this away from the handful of people bothering. I’ve had my video on how to do it with the Wii up for over 24 hours and published it on a few sites and so far I have only 116 hits. That’s not to say that Activision won’t do it. This was a horrible decision in the first place if you ask me.
(Btw I’m a programmer too, but not a game programmer).
WOOT!!! I now have one less thing annoying me about skylanders! Thx!
Now for the hack to get Swashbucklers legs and Ninjas bodies! (Bodies?! Bodies?!)
I want four legged options. It’s a spyro game, he is the main character, and I cannot make a dragon…..
Let’s hope for imaginators part 2.
Chopscotch: No body – No body forced on a Creation Class
Bad Juju: No legs – No legs forced on a Creation Class
Mysticat: Four legs – Four legs forced on…. No Creation Class. Not even an option… Going back to the sense that Activision can make at times.
Hello! Does anyone know what the level cap is for creation crystal characters?
It starts at 15, but each time you put a new Sensei figure on the Portal it goes up by 1.
There was a promo video that showed a character go from 21 to 22, it’ll be another week until my amazon order arrives and I was wondering if anyone knows how high the cap is, with 31 sensei it could theoretically be 46!
Mine are 35 so far.
Mate, that’s epic! Have you found a second occurrence of duplicates or do the item stats only get upgraded once?
No. not yet. I know if you have variations (dark golden queen and standard golden queen) they both increase the level.
How does the difficulty scale when you are 35? I only have enough to be at 22 and Hard difficulty for Imaginators is not hard at all. I wish they left Nightmare mode unlocked like in SuperChargers. Sensei’s on the other hand don’t do nearly as well thanks to not being super effective against Doomlanders.
I can’t tell you. I have only played one lever but scanned in all sensei characters. All skylander games are the same though. The character doesn’t get stronger with levels. He just gains higher pit points. So I assume it’s just harder to die?
Good point. Seeing as one can get such a high level it is dissappointing to see being able to equip Ultimate level gear at level 6.
Actually, I just watched Kaos as he was leveling and his stats indeed where increasing with level.
That’s great news. Every game before was basically HP. I have been so busy with school and work that I have only played the first level of SIM. Sad days. I’m usually the guy that takes the week off and just plays it into the ground. I did not even know you could see skylander stats on this game. That’s a first as well. Isn’t it? We used to get the cards but that was all.
Which reminds me; I’m very sad I don’t get cards anymore, activision.
I challenge all comers to a corniness contest. My entrees are a skeletal dragon bow slinger call Dragonbownes and a jet pack wearing armoured quick shot called Betta Fett 😉
I have a earth mushroom ninja called Bouldstool, a fire quick shot called Gunfire, a magic brawler called Crystal Brawl and an undead swashbuckler called Exskullibur.
Exskullibur +1.
I made an dark bow slinger named Darkniss Everscream
That’s a good one. I plan to make several for each element so will post some more when I do.
I have a New 3DS XL, so all I need is a SSA game and portal for 3DS, which I can easily find on eBay! Thanks for the info, Matt! Now I can make endless resets!
Just go check GameStop first. I bet they will sell refurbished crazy they took in old portals. They can’t cost more than a couple bucks.
I actually just checked. Both portal and game, less than $10.
I also just went to Ebay. The cheapest copy of the game is $7.50 and the cheapest portal is $15!!!
Go to GameStop. Or try to find one clearances cheap at a Walmart or bargain hunt.
I’ve also gotten cheap versions of skylanders as birthday gifts for friends children at Five below they have portals and various versions of the game usually wii or 3ds for $5
This is great news, I have the 3DS and the SSA game, thanks for sharing 🙂
I have 1 question, I’m curious if you also can reset the Imaginite Mystery Chests ??
Oh my goodness. What an idea. Someone please try this!!
It did not work.
It turns out you can also reset the battle class using Skylander Giants and a Wii console. No need for a 3DS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgtWlRAG3SE
That’s stellar! I had to use reset broken toys with.. the level pack Phoenix dragon dude whose name escapes me at the moment. Surprises me that that’s just on wii..
But it’s crazy I didn’t think of it. I got giants and spyro’s adventure at the same time. I let my little brother borrow giants to take to his dorm because he had bought just two characters including pop fizz.
In the meantime I busted the aforementioned figure by portaling next to a metal chair leg or something, looked up a solution, and waited impatiently for my brother to return Giants.
Long story short, back then I discovered that 3ds spyro and wii giants had the same function, but I didn’t put it together when I heard about the 3ds reset this week.
Sunburn. Great character.
Yep sure is. That’s one bad thing about the later games introducing more and more characters…some of the old characters have been left behind but I find them just as interesting as when they were first brought out.
It may work for other consoles. I don’t know.
Cool. Now I don’t need to buy SSA for 3DS. I never would have found this myself. Thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome. Glad you found it useful. Have had reports it works on a Wii U. Waiting for reports form other consoles. I have Skylander Giants on the Xbox 360 but I can’t be bothered trying it because this works well enough for me and I don’t want to spend more time on it.
Thanks! Do you think resetting a crystal will work with Skylanders Giants on an Xbox 360? Then playing the crystal on a WiiU?
Try it and let us know. One person has said reset with Xbox 360 didn’t work for him. I don’t have a crystal that doesn’t have a character the kids want to keep on it, so my experimenting is over until we buy more….which I’m hoping won’t be till Christmas.
I will, once I get the starter pack. I don’t have it yet.
I tried resetting a water crystal using your Giants tip and haven’t gotten it to work. WiiU hardware, Giants WiiU software. I ran Giants with a Giant character using the same portal as shown in the video. Went to the main menu, replaced with a Water crystal loaded with a battle class/figure. The ‘repair toy’ option comes up and I’ve chosen it, but it doesn’t reset the crystal. That still has the Water character on it. Maybe you need Giants Wii software?
I don’t know. Does the Wii software even work on the Wii U? I’m afraid I can’t test any of this out as the only consoles I own that run these games are the Wii and Xbox 360. I however tell you that I have used this on 2 different Wii consoles.
Just for your information, I tried this method on xbox 360 skylander giant but it didn’t work. I tried the wii method and worked like a charm (thanks to Sammy01). used over 16 new crystal and created different battlecast/characters and then reset them all without any problem.
Thanks for the feedback. You’re the 3rd or 4th person that has let me know this does not work with Xbox 360 version of Giants. Perhaps someone that only has a 360 can try Swap Force, Trap Team and Superchargers to see if any of those work.
I haven’t heard a thing about PS3 or later games on Xbox One and PS4. I’m still waiting
Fortunately used Wiis are both common to see in gamer’s old console collections and cheap compared to both Xbox 360 and 3DS so it is an option if you find yourself wanting to reuse crystals a lot. As in the main article I agree that you always should weigh that up against just buying more crystals.
OK, this is getting ridiculous!! its almost been a week, and youve barely posted ANYTHING!!!!!
There is no problem with that. This is Matt’s website, and he posts as he sees fit. IN fact, the only thing ridiculous is you getting flustered because there isn’t any actual news for Matt to report, and rather than enjoying the game, you are most likely checking this site many times a day hoping for a giant news story.
Calm down. Relax. Take a deep breath. And please, please don’t rage at me. This isn’t the place for anger.
As we know from Matt’s Twitter and Youtube accounts, he as been busy playing the game that released not even one whole WEEK ago. He’s also been busy creating and editing videos for us to enjoy (which I have. Keep up the great work Matt. Loving the playthroughs). If there was news, I’m sure he would report it. But the fact is, there isn’t. It’s a week after launch, and all of Wave 1 and 2 have already been released. I wouldn’t expect substantial news for a while, as in theory the only thing left for Skylanders this year is Wave 3, which is about a month and a half away.
If you are not happy with this site, the first thing you don’t do is get upset with the guy who runs it and expect him to turn out daily articles on nothing. There are plenty of other news outlets, like Skylanders Inquirer, that you could use instead of this one. But SCL is definitely far superior, and I suggest that you just enjoy the game for a while. After all, its only Skylanders.
Thank you for the excellent defense. I don’t think I could have said it better myself.
Enigma, could you send me an email or a DM on Twitter?
I agree a 100% with Enigma. Great info from SCL Matt!! Enjoy the game
I agree. Plus, Mr. SCL_Matt is VERY forgiving on off topic conversations. Many moderators probably would have dropped many a ban hammer on a lot of these threads but he gives us quite a wide berth to enjoy talking about the game/series in general.
Hey guys. In case you read below the idea about resetting mystery chests with a 3ds, I can confirm that it does NOT work. Sorry. It did absolutely nothing.
That’s too bad … Thanks for trying
Hmm. I thought the treasure chests had set attributes and not writable? If so all the game does is reveal what’s on them.
The difference was, when you scan a crystal in SSA, it says it can’t be read and asks to reset. When I placed a chest on it, it acted as if nothing was there. Nothing triggered.
The chest is probably a read only figure and they each have a unique serial that once read in a particular game save you can’t ever use it in THAT save. You are more than welcome to use it in a different game save.
At least you can use them multiple times if you have different game saves. I bought the game for Xbox 360, Xbox One and PS4 so far and I was able to use the chest in my 360 save and my Xbox One save.
Not surprised here. The functionality of the Chests is completely different from the Crystals.
I think creation crystals will be a pain in the b…, just like the traps. I went to TRU and the employee opened over 4 boxes of creation crystals in front of me, and she couldn’t find the air crystal that I need. 4 boxes with 2 or more water crystals, 2 or more earth crystals, but none air…I think that Activision is forgetting about the kids (my son drives me crazy with all this stuff), and for some reason the air crystal from Imaginators will be like the dark and light traps from Trap Team. 🙁
If you don’t care about crystal molds, there’s an air crystal bundled with the wave 3 adventure pack. There’s also an air in a triple pack with life and water.
The new Light and Dark are more likely to be Light and especially Dark. As far as we know, those two crystals are only coming as singles. (There’s fire in the starter, earth in the observatory adventure pack available now, and a triple pack with tech, magic, and undead. And yes, technically there is a dark crystal in the store-exclusive dark edition, which didn’t solve the Kaos trap problem any.) Fire, Air and Earth singles could easily become the new shelf-warmers and deter stores from ordering more cases of singles, which would hurt Light and Dark the most assuming they don’t get a future triple pack release.
I would argue that Light crystals are fairly common (by production) but may sell rather quickly. I do see what you are saying about the Fire, Air, and Earth crystals, and personally, I am afraid of the possible numbers of Dark crystals, since I didn’t pick up the Dark Edition.
But, I have a funny story (although read with caution if stock issues tend to make you mad). It was Winter, 2015, some time after Trap Team Wave 4 was released. I went to Target and stumbled upon the Skylanders section where Wave 4 stock was relatively low. Luckily, they had just what I was looking for: Echo. Also luckily, they had a random 10% off sale on Skylanders. Again, lucky me! You may think that was that, but no. Being who I am, I decided to look at their wonderful selection of Earth Hammer and Water Jughead traps. Also being who I am, I crouched to the lowest shelf, the one with the starter packs, and took a glance behind them. And what did I find? Kaos traps! Not one, not two, not three, but…FOUR!!! All cleverly hidden, or so someone thought.
Now you may be asking yourself, “What did Enigma do with those Kaos traps?” Well, I did what any responsible person would do…and bought all four to sell online for $100 apiece.
…Don’t worry, I’m only kidding. I would never do that with something like the Kaos trap. What I DID do was place all four onto the front of a peg, then purchased Echo. That’s right. I didn’t even buy one. Why? I already had one from my local GameStop (the trap wasn’t out on the sales floor yet; i was told it was the only one that store received, and it was in a box in the back. Keep in mind, this was December). I was already well aware of the scarcity of this trap, and I knew that others were looking for it, so why not put them where everyone could see them? I only hope I made some children happy, and that a scalper didn’t buy all four…
I bought the air creation crystal online. In PR there are limited stores selling skylanders and I visited 4 stores (2 Walmart, 2 TRU) and none had the triple packs. With my online purchases and TRU purchases I have wave 1 & 2 completed. But I will not hope on getting all creation crystals molds.
To early to discuss the next Yawn Trap/Thrillipede. These are the two waves that we will probably be getting until Black Friday. A Gamestop down the street had 8 figures and four traps. They’ll restock. In fact, I went looking for water crystals and all my WalMart had was Air. If we’re going to worry about what is or isn’t going to be released let’s worry about Dark Crystals and Chompy Mage. Both are available but only to specific consumers, just like Yawn Traps (Australia) and Thrillipede (Europe)
Only one of the waves Had air crystals. So if they opened the same wave 4 times, they won’t get an air crystal.
Heh, funny story, I just dug out the old Nintendo Wii because my wife wanted to try out Wii Tennis with our daughter, and I figured what the heck, might as well grab a Wii Giants Portal Owners pack for a couple of bucks since I only got into toys to life during the PS4 era and never played Giants. So if this trick works, that purchase is paying for itself in short order.
Will be interested to hear if it works with other consoles too. Also if it works with all elements.
Xbox 360 Giants work until you get “reset broken toys” button press and yes but crystal not resetting . #fail 🙁
Thanks for that update. I no longer have a crystal with a character the kids don’t want to keep. I’ll only be trying if we get more. I imagine the code could be very different between the consoles so I don’t doubt this could be true. The nice thing is they can’t update Skylander Giants remotely on the Wii (whereas they could for Xbox 360).So the only way they could remove this workaround that I can think of is
1) To somehow get the Imaginators to detect the hack and refuse to reset the crystal, which you could probably work around by removing updates, or
2) By physically modifying newer crystals so they can’t be hacked somehow, in which case the first production run of crystals become very valuable as they are resettable.
I wonder if they’ll bother. What they could do if they wanted to surprise us is just remove this unpopular and harmful restriction and realise that for every extra crystal they sell they’ll be turning off another gamer from bothering to play further. Look at what Niantic has done to sabotage itself with Pokemon Go restrictions.
on my xbox 360 offline ive totaly uninstall and wipe data beside my cloud savegames before trying to reset crystal from the menu as the youtube video show but its a diff console i know and still nothing work i keep trying with giants but my best would be on WII:U giants beside wii/3ds also i have SSA on 360 no way that could work unless someone has another tutorial how to do it since we dont have wandel as npc but hugo, my current tests leaded to nothing great actualy i still try to find giants on WiI:u cheap to give a go. if i find anything else ima let everyone know!
I’ve now had multiple reports it doesn’t work on WiiU so don’t go and buy it especially.
tested with giants software of wii on my wii:u as wii mode and it worked! +1
Giants is a great game. Yes. It’s worth it. Try swap force next. That’s the best so far.
Good thing I recently picked up the Giants Portal Owner’s pack on 3DS at Gamestop,
If anybody else needs the cartridge for this version, you might be able to pick up the Owner’s pack version for only $.97 (if it’s in stock in your area, no only orders)
An update from my reply below on using Giants to reset crystals: WiiU running in Wii mode with the Wii Giants software DOES WORK to reset Creation Crystals. I loaded and played the Giants Wii version on my WiiU with Tree Rex on the Imaginator portal. Went to the main menu, swapped on a magic crystal with a figure loaded then chose Settings and the Fix Toy option. Back in Imaginators, the magic creation crystal loaded as factory new. So now folks with a Wii or WiiU can reset crystals too using the Giants software for the Wii.
I tried the same thing with Spyro’s Adventure (Wii disc) and Giants (WiiU disc) and neither worked. I picked up a copy of Giants (Wii) for $12 and am now free to experiment to my hearts content. And by the way, defeating the doomlander in the Cradle of Creation with a level two Tree Rex is possible, but I don’t recommend it!
Confirmed creation crystal reset method, no 3DS, Wii, or other games required:
Using a PC (Windows 7 or Windows 10), the old Skylander Editor will do it, if you can find it. You need a non-XBox portal, I have one that came with a BattleGrounds pack, registers as a Wii portal, but a PS portal should also work, and the Spyro Adventure USB portal driver which is commonly bundled with the editor. When reading the crystal with the editor it will tell you that something is corrupt with the character, which makes sense as it’s not a normal character. Just read from the crystal to a file, ignore the corruption message, and then write that file back to the crystal.
After writing back to the crystal it will be corrupted. Put the crystal back on the portal and it will complain the crystal is corrupt and ask if you want to recover it. Choose recover and your crystal will be reset and the game will announce that a new crystal was put on the portal.
Thanks for this. But having a hard time finding a 3ds portal for the Spyro Adventure, but managed to track down a 3ds giants portal. Will the Giants portal work with the Spyros adventure game?
Yes. Any 3DS Portal will work. They’re all interchangeable. It’s the game that matters.
I did just as Gajim said below and it worked perfectly. Make sure to go to the settings through the main menu, not by pushing the + button
cant you just patch it so we can just create over and over instead of this bullshit system for resetting
This is awesome.. thanks I can buy used crystals for like 3$ and this how too made it a great deal.