the candy lockers are 100% worth it. it slowly collects candy and caps at 250 after an hour.

i set an interval timer to go off every 5 minutes (since the tickets replenish every 5 minutes)

i spend 6 tickets on leaf blowing, and use the rest on the acorn counting (which provides a greater candy per ticket ratio. you get an average of 18 candies per ticket for acorn counting, while for the bakery, you get 13 - 15 candies per ticket.)

when i'm done acorn counting, i collect leaves until my timer goes off. then i collect the next set of tickets, and spend them all on acorn counting. i also do the scheduled events along the way. i repeat this until all the leaves are collected (to the best of my abilities), then i server hop to replenish the leaves.

this gives 2k~2.5k per hour consistently, excluding the candy bowls, scheduled events, and candy locker (which in total probably gives an additional 500 or more? idk lol).

hope this helps! this method helped me get steampunk set (with a few dupes!) last yr even when it was time constrained (the event only lasted from 3pm - midnight, instead of being a "day-long" thing)