I am working on a personal project to create a game, in which you can fly in space to various planets and land on said planets. I was originally using a script to create an IcoSphere which I stored using recursive chunks which worked as a LOD. The results looked good from space, however, after creating a player on the planet, the triangles were still very large. The IcoSphere was only subdivided 5 or 6 times due to the lengthy processing times. I was going to base the texturing of the magnitude of the point on the sphere taking into account various factors.
Is there a better method to generate planets without these processing times?
EDIT
I am only interested in generating the planet surface, not the positioning in the galaxy/universe
I have done research online into different techniques. I've seen people using cube spheres however that looked to have caused a lot of distortion around the corners. I've also seen Octohedrons which were subdivided but I think that'd give the same problems as my icosphere technique