What is it ?

The tropics is a nice and calm dimension themed around a peaceful tropical environment, in which anyone would want to have spend a vacation;
It adds content related to what one might expect from some days off on some lush islands around the Equator, with some cool tracks to listen too while building your new house.

What does it offer ?

A warm world and a whole new tropical landscape for you to live in.
There isn't much in terms of progression and equipements apart from a few armor sets and tools, as well as some diving gear, as this dimension is really not at all focused on dungeon crawling nor getting geared up for the next challenge.
There some decent building block variety and ambient creatures which can give life to building projects made in this realm. The music is also quite good, especially the music discs with some that I quite like. I find it a bit weird that vanilla music seems to play in the dimension at times, but it could be an intentional choice for all I know.
I saw a bunch of critics based on the more modern dimension worldgen changes as this mod seem to bring memories to many out there, and the tropics's generation probably used to be a bit flatter than it is now which might not be pleasing to some, and that is without counting the fact that many new blocks introduced by the mod have since been simply replaced by their vanilla counterpart (such as mud or bamboo).
I know this may be just me but I don't really like the mod's current artstyle (especially regarding the mod's item textures in 1.21.8) ? I would like to mention it in case it may subconsciously affect my review. Also in the version I tried this mod in (as of this review I tried it in 1.21.8 last version), parts of the mod had some issues such as the Cowktail model being broken, and it seems quite a lot of the ambient mobs present in this mod lack unique sound effects too which is a shame honestly even if not technically required.

In conclusion

This mod somewhat succeeds at bringing to life a new tropical environnement , though in its current iteration it is a bit more nuanced than simply saying 'it works'.
I always like it when a mod brings in its own way of teaching the player custom mechanics and introduce its own content without external requirements such as JEI among others, so I quite like it when a mod brings its own book (though I prefer other means), which I find weirdly absent from the last 1.21 release I tried.
This mod is mostly a vibe more than it is anything else really, and while it is not my favorite kind of experiences I can understand the purpose of mods like these and why it grew in popularity; Though I would say the competition is tougher in current recent versions of the game and many mods out there might offer a similar or better experience, so while it may have been a really good mod in the past I don't think it currently stands a chance against 1.20+ dimension mods .

It is of note that there is a maintained fork for 1.7.10 called Tropicraft Continuation , which I haven't tried, but it might be worth checking out.

I may go back to this review in the future later on, feel free to make up your own mind on this mod and review it as well, your opinion matters