What about making them icosahedron? It has 20 triangles, which you can have in cubes and connecting side-to side to each-other. So you\'d need to make a much bigger planet (which make more sense, than having tens of planets being flat like now), occupying almost entire sector by itself, and depending on which side you\'re approaching/landing/walking it will pre-load four of those triangles (one target and three adjacent).
The most difficulty here is to make a visual effect, that bends the surface outwards as you go higher into athmosphere, so that the world would appear round, while not being such. So it would literally push 4 triandles outwards from the center and they would appear as perfectly fitting sphere fraction, but when you get close, it will become completely flat, have a one-direction gravity and full size underground. Where there\'s no rendered surface triangles, you\'d see just a rough textured circle, merging with planet\'s loaded surface to some extent. Basically a visual interpolation.
I\'m an artist, not a programmer, so I can\'t really tell how hard it is to implement, I just base myself on a Minecraft Open GL engine, which allowed entire world bending randomly in the distance with little to no effect to the performance.