How to get rid of annoying colonist? Or don't?

[Dorian]

I've got this one colonist, Virtue, who is the main chef, and has high cooking skills.  The problem is, he won't ever haul, and doesn't like mining, or doing much else.  Sometime he will do construction, but his life consists mostly of cooking, eating and sleeping.  He's usually very happy but tends to go into a mental break for no reason and starts setting things on fire, but doesn't have pyro as a trait.  I've had him arrested once before, just to stop him from burning the place down.

How can I get rid of him without upsetting the colony?  Just arrest him and release?  Executing him will make the colony upset.  Is there a way I haven't seen of forcing someone to leave the colony?  He is an awesome cook, but he's started fires 3 times already...

[Hans Lemurson]

A good Chef basically pulls their own weight in a colony.  Cooking is a frequent and omnipresent task if you're not going to be using Nutrient Paste Dispensers.

If he can reliably turn your farm products into delicious food, I see no reason why you shouldn't put up with his occasional psychotic episode.  Arresting him when he puts cooking fires in the wrong place doesn't seem like too much to ask.  Firefighting is the #1 priority of every colonist in my colony.

Unless you have a skilled chef lined up to replace him when he suffers an "unfortunate accident" (or you just add euthanasia to the surgery bills on his health tab), then you should appreciate what he CAN do for the colony, rather than what he can't. 

Find out what's bothering him and give him a better room (with less rock rubble and vomit stains) or fresh clothing or more recreation time, or even just a comfy chair in front of the stove when he's slaving away.

[Dorian]

I do have all my colonists set to 1 for firefighting, and arresting him did work, but when my hunter tried to arrest him, they broke out into a fight and both of them needed medical attention afterwards.  Then the chef was fine and carried on normally, but they were both out of the game for a while during recovery.

His mood is always high, so I don't understand why he sets things on fire, because he already has the nicest cleanest room in my colony, with plants, art, etc.

Is euthanizing the best option to get rid of a colonist?  Is there no option to just kick someone out?

[Hans Lemurson]

As far as I know there's no way to kick somebody out.  Death or kidnapping (hard to engineer) is the only way to reliably be rid of someone.

If you feel queasy about Euthanasia, you could make him form a one-man caravan and send him off to visit a Pirate base.

As for arresting people turning into fist-fights, I usually don't bother with a normal arrest for the dangerous psychotic breaks.  I draft the 3 nearest guys and order them all to melee-attack the colonist to beat some sense into him.  Colonists go down pretty quick with 3:1 odds, and so long as none of them had knives or spears, it's rarely life threatening.

Large numbers of small injuries heal pretty quickly and train up your doctors.  Bruises and cracks don't bleed and never seem to get infected.  Your "discipline squad" will usually have 2-3 bruises apiece but those are basically gone in a day or so.  Harm done during a psychotic episode doesn't seem to result in any relationship penalties the way friendly-fire incidents do.

[Dorian]

Oh I'll do euthanasia if I have to, I'm just not sure if that will affect everyone's mood like execution does.  I already executed a prisoner before and everyone was all upset about it for a while.

[Hans Lemurson]

Compared with things like Raw Cannibalism, Starvation, Chronic Pain, or Psychic Drones, the penalty for euthanasia is actually pretty mild.  I think it's just like -3 for 6 days, so long as nobody was actually friends with said colonist.

[Ragnarok]

Try adding a comfy chair, flowers, a statue, or anything nice near where he works to keep him as happy as possible throughout the day. If I he still has mental breaks then uhh, try what everyone else said.

[Perq]

You will get semi-useless colonists more often than not. The thing is to make them useful.
I've got a pawn who can't do dumb labor, intellectual, scary and is bad in everything else. He can, however, make bricks. And he makes metric shitton of these...