We extend a recent argument of Kahn, Narayanan and Park ((2021) Proceedings of the AMS 149 3201–3208) about the threshold for the appearance of the square of a Hamilton cycle to other spanning structures. In particular, for any spanning graph, we give a sufficient condition under which we may determine its threshold. As an application, we find the threshold for a set of cyclically ordered copies of $C_4$ that span the entire vertex set, so that any two consecutive copies overlap in exactly one edge and all overlapping edges are disjoint. This answers a question of Frieze. We also determine the threshold for edge-overlapping spanning $K_r$-cycles.

We prove a ‘resilience’ version of Dirac’s theorem in the setting of random regular graphs. More precisely, we show that whenever d is sufficiently large compared to $\epsilon > 0$, a.a.s. the following holds. Let $G'$ be any subgraph of the random n-vertex d-regular graph $G_{n,d}$ with minimum degree at least $$(1/2 + \epsilon )d$$. Then $G'$ is Hamiltonian.

This proves a conjecture of Ben-Shimon, Krivelevich and Sudakov. Our result is best possible: firstly the condition that d is large cannot be omitted, and secondly the minimum degree bound cannot be improved.