Planet generation seems fine to me...this is the "smiley face on side" biome...its a top secret biome that is very rare to get.
I think it is interesting that you can see the seams between the projected/inflated cube sides that make up the planet, it looks like it will take some tweaking to get that to mesh better.
It isn't a cube, except for texture region projection, which looks good most of the time except for when you see something that wasn't really meant to be seen by users.
That's no exploded cube. It's constructive solid geometry: Mavor's Rants: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terrain Geometry
It's both. CSG is for all complex terrain features, but the base sphere itself is generated programatically via a normalized cube.
