Hi Damien, creating 3D printed tags that clone Skylander figures is possible but not trivial. For the figure itself, we use thin epoxy coated NFC tags and introduce them during the 3D printing process. This takes some skill and experience to get a good result. The hardest part though is cloning the content of the Skylander NFC tags in order to produce the gaming experience. This will require an NFC reader like an Android NFC phone/tablet or one of our mobile readers and some software to read/decrypt the tag content and write it to another blank tag.

The Nintendo/Disney/Activision figures protect the data they carry to prevent cloning and piracy. They lock the data sectors of the NFC tags with an array of different keys. You can’t “find out” the key from the figure’s tag. They are generated on the fly inside the Gaming Portals based on the UUID of the tag. In the case of Skylanders, every figure has 15 unique keys making it impossible to crack one and use those keys to copy other figures. So you need to reverse engineer the complicated math to generate these keys in order to easily clone figures. Although doable, this is illegal according to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) so we can’t help you there.

best,
Richard

Hi Damien, glad to help. It seems the NFC tags used in the Skylander figures are a nondescript TNP3xxx chip from NXP. I came to this conclusion by scanning one with an Android NFC phone using the NFC TagInfo app. The ATQA is 0x0F01 and the SAK is 0x01 which according to this NXP reference document, corresponds to TNP3xxx. No spec sheets seem to be available for this part though.

I googled around to validate my findings and seems others have come to similar results. We don’t sell any tags with the TNP3xxx chip and not aware of any other vendor that does either. I guess you could try with a Mifare Classic and see if you can get it to work. Interested to see what you learn and glad to guide you where possible.

best,
Richard