Recently I experimented with increasing the level of detail on planetary textures. Previously, each planet had a small texture generated (only 5x8 pixels) which contained the colour palette: The first axis assigned to point height/latitude, and the second axis assigned to point slope. The shader that generates procedural textures for planets, uses this texture to determine the colour of planetary surface points (IE the color of pixels from the generated texture). To achieve such great detail, it was necessary to significantly increase the number of octaves of various noise functions and write custom functions to generate textures of different materials (for example, in version 0.94 you can see the strata on the mountains - this would be an example of such a function).