Procedural Heightmap Terrain Generation

This looks very good on the micro level, but not so much on the macro level ("blobby", in the author's own words). Part of what's needed is something that at least somewhat emulates plate tectonics and other real geological processes - not well enough for simulation purposes, but well enough to get things to look right to a human viewer.

This is a nice description of the manual version of the process (in the context of RPG setting design): http://www.giantitp.com/articles/xO3dVM8EDKJPlKxmVoG.html

There are a lot of helpful blogs / pages to get started, but non (that I could find) teach about perfecting the result. Are there any? From the end result here to a real scenery like https://www.seedofandromeda.com/assets/images/blogs/rockies.... seems quite far off.

Nice detailed article.

There is also some interesting information about making quadtree-based quad spheres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrilateralized_spherical_cu...) in this presentation about the making of Kerbal Space Program, at 30min 40s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXTxQko-JH0 (the whole thing is worth the watch).

This is a great introduction to procedural planet generation.

There's only so far you can go with this tactic. Instead of a high-res LOD height-map built with the same old functions, I'd really love to see a low-res off-line calculated world with overhangs, erosion effects, impact crater, and other crazy structures.

I've been working on a version of this (almost the same techniques described in this post) for a game I'm working on. The internets has loads of tutorials on how to do this sort of thing - there was a paper published describing these techniques from 2011). Pretty cool stuff.