The photo is a snuggle sack, which is still his favourite thing to sleep in, though not every week.

I went through a phase of buying a new hide every time I saw one I liked. What I actually found useful is having about five hides and swapping three of them out every couple of weeks rather than putting all of them in at once.

Why rotation beats adding more:

- With five hides in the cage there is no space left to dig, and the bedding depth is the thing that matters most.
- Any hide that sits in the cage too long becomes part of the furniture and gets ignored. Take it out for two weeks, put it back, and it is new again.
- It is a cheap way to give them something to investigate, which is most of what a hamster does with its waking hours.

What is in my rotation:

- A snuggle sack (fabric). Mine sleeps in it most nights, pushing it against the side of the cage first.
- A ceramic hide with a flat roof. This one doubles as the cooling spot in summer, and he stands on top of it to look around.
- A multi-chamber wooden house. The most expensive thing in the cage and the one he uses for storing food rather than sleeping. Worth it anyway, because the chambers give him somewhere to drag bedding into.
- A coconut half, for when the base is already deep and he wants a small entrance at floor level.
- A cork tunnel under the bedding. They burrow into it from below and find a dead end and that seems to be the point.

Two things to check on anything you put in: no sharp edges inside the entrance, and the opening is wide enough that a full-cheeked hamster can turn around in it. I learned the second one the hard way with a plastic tube he got stuck in for a moment.

Also: clean a fabric hide the way you would clean anything else they sleep in. Warm water, no detergent smell. If it still smells like soap after drying, it is not going back in.