Ahead of Contra arriving in Vampire Survivors with Operation Guns, developer Poncle has released a new free 1.10 update for the roguelike entitled the “Laborratory” update. The update adds new achievements for those of you who love that sort of thing, as well as a new character, new stages and new weapons.

“Since the early days of VS, people have been asking important questions like ‘Why is it called Santa Water?’,” reads the update. The Laborratory update aims to address that, introducing the Santa Ladonna character to Vampire Survivors, who starts out with nothing but a temporary cooldown bonus, and automatically triggers a Rosary when reaching critically low HP.

For weapons, you have the new Santa Javelin, which evolves into Seraphic Cry. Starting out, the Santa Javelin aims for random enemies, can critically hit and turn the Duration stat into additional Amount for itself. In order to evolve it into the Seaphic Cry, players will need a maxed out Clover. The evolution uses Luck to deal additional damage. Picking up Rosaries while it is equipped turns them into a quadruple screen clearing explosion that will turn enemies into XP gems.

In addition to the new patch, Poncle has dropped some progress updates on a couple of topics. Cross-saves are currently in beta branches on Steam, while progress on online co-op is going well, but it’s “still too early for more details”. The developer is also working on a new feature which will allow for new Adventures, which are standalone campaigns that were introduced in previous updates. “We had planned to make new Adventures more often, but then realized that while they work very well to isolate new DLC content, the base-game ones are missing something. So we’ve been working on adding a new feature to the game (that will remain a little secret for now) after which we’ll be back releasing new adventures.”

Meanwhile, Vampire Survivors:Operation Guns will launch May 9 across PC and consoles, and will head to the PlayStation version once it’s been released.